SUMMARY

Effortless legal access to full text scholarly articles

FIND OPEN ACCESS

When you view a research article, Open Access Helper detects the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the document and then will query the APIs of unpaywall.org and core.ac.uk to find a link for a legal open access copy. Simply click the Open Access Helper badge to access the document!

As you hover your mouse over the Open Access Helper badge, the extension will tell you whether you are going to see the “Published Version”, “Accepted Version” or “Submitted Version”. The two APIs employed are the gold standard for this type of information.

EZPROXY

Many university libraries employ a remote access solution known as EZProxy. This solution functions by rerouting your connection through the institution’s server and thus making it look to the publisher as if you were on campus. All you have to do is access the settings, type the domain of your institution (e.g. harvard.edu for Harvard University) and save.

When enabled, you can click on the toolbar icon (make sure it is visible) and the popup will show a button to proxy the current page. While I cannot guarantee that your library subscribes to the paper, it couldn’t be more convenient to at least try! In the future, I hope to make this feature more awesome.

IS IT LEGAL?

It’s perfectly legal, as these links are either to an official open access publication, or the author-archived manuscripts found at university and government web servers.

PRIVACY

This extension does not collect any Personally Identifiable Information. It does however collected some basic, anonymous usage signals to help guide my development effort. Please see the privacy policy for details.

I have a full time job with a fun company, and if you are interested, just look at the code within the extension - it’s not minimised and has plenty of comments (and quite likely a bunch of bugs - do let me know about those, please!).

The latest version of Open Access Helper Web is available on the Chrome web and is currently being used by 4,000 active users. The initial version was launched on 2020-10-20.

HOW TO INSTALL Open Access Helper Web FROM A CRX FILE

1. Download Open Access Helper Web CRX file
2. NOTE: Sometimes the browser may block downloading / installing CRX file from outside the Chrome Web Store. If so, you may need to download the ZIP file instead
3. In the URL bar, go to chrome://extensions
4. Enable Developer mode

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