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How to Download a Scientific Paper for Free | by Abhinav Chandoli | Geek Culture | Medium
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Category Archives: oa.unpaywall
The State of Unpaywall: Analyzing the Consistency of Open Access Data | Zenodo
Abstract: These result highlight the difficulties of identifying the open access status of a publication. Especially for less rigid OA subgroups like Hybrid and Bronze OA the classification task is a process of iterating over improved algorithms. Generally, it can be assumed that these iterations lead towards a more accurate reflection of the true OA status. This process, however, has implications for the academic users of Unpaywall data. Studies that use these data to analyze OA status and especially OA subgroups should be aware that the reliability of the data and reproducibility of the results are dependent on time and infrastructural design choice. This observation poses essential background information for OA studies that rely on Unpaywall data at a single point in time.
For the OA transformation, the results also highlight the importance of author-choice based contributions. Publisher-choice based contributions appear to be harder to identify but also volatile in their status over time. For Open Access studies, these findings provide empirical reasons for caution when including data on Bronze OA into their analysis. For the OA transformation in general, the findings highlight authors as the key contributors to a successful transformation.
Analyzing Your Institution’s Publishing Output
Abstract: Understanding institutional publishing output is crucial to scholarly communications work. This class will equip participants to analyze article publishing by authors at an institution.
After completing the course, participants will be able to
Gain an understanding of their institution’s publishing output, such as number of publications per year, open access status of the publications, major funders of the research, and estimates of how much funding might be spent toward article processing charges (APCs).
Think critically about institutional publishing data to make sustainable and values-driven scholarly communications decisions.
This course will build on open infrastructure, including Unpaywall and OpenRefine. We will provide examples of how to do analyses in both OpenRefine and Microsoft Excel.
The course will consist of two parts. In the first, participants will learn how to build a dataset. We will provide lessons about downloading data from different sources: Web of Science, Scopus, and The Lens. (Web of Science and Scopus are subscription databases; The Lens is freely available.)
In the second part of the course, participants will learn data analysis methods that can help answer questions such as:
Should you cancel or renew a subscription?
Who is funding your institution’s researchers?
Are your institution’s authors using an institutional repository?
Should you accept a publisher’s open access publishing offer?
Library agreements with publishers are at a crucial turning point, as they more and more often include OA publishing. By learning to do these analyses for themselves, participants will be better prepared to enter into negotiations with a publisher. The expertise developed through this course can make the uneven playing field of library-publisher negotiations slightly more even.
Course materials will be openly available. This will be a facilitated course taught by the authors.
Extending the open monitoring of open science – Archive ouverte HAL
Abstract: Abstract : We present a new Open Science Monitor framework at the country level for the case of France. We propose a fine-grained monitoring of the dynamics of the open access to publications, based on historical data from Unpaywall, and thus limited to Crossref-DOI documents. The economic models of journals publishing French publications are analyéed as well as the open access dynamics by discipline and open access route (publishers and repositories). The French Open Science Monitor (BSO) website: https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr presents the results to date (last observation date December 2021). 62% of the 170,000 French 2020 publications are available in December 2021. This rate has increased by 10 points in one year. The level of open access varies significantly from one discipline to another. Some disciplines, such as the physical sciences and mathematics, have long been committed to opening up their publications, while others, such as chemistry, are rapidly catching up. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the urgent need to open up scholarly outputs in the health field, a specific version of the French Open Science Monitor has been built: https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr/health. It monitors the open access dynamics of French publications in the biomedical field. It also analyses the transparency of the results of clinical trials and observational studies conducted in France. Only 57% of clinical trials completed in the last 10 years have shared their results publicly. In contrast to other Open Science Monitoring initiatives, the source code and the data of the French Open Science Monitor are shared with an open licence. The source code used for the French Open Science Monitor is available on GitHub, and shared with an open licence. The code is split in modules, in particular for indicators computations https://github.com/dataesr/bso-publications and https://github.com/dataesr/bso-clinical-trials and the web user interface https://github.com/dataesr/bso-ui. The data resulting of this work is shared on the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation open data portal: https://data.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/explore/dataset/open-access-monitor-france/information/ and https://data.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/explore/dataset/barometre-sante-de-la-science-ouverte/information/. The originality of the French Open Science Monitor also lies in the fact that it can easily be adapted to the level of an higher education and research institution. To date, some twenty higher education and research institutions have already used it to obtain reliable and open indicators on the progress of open science in their scientific production.
Analyzing Institutional Publishing Output-A Short Course – Google Docs
“This short course provides training materials about how to create a set of publication data, gather additional information about the data through an API (Application Programming Interface), clean the data, and analyze the data in various ways. The API that we’ll use is from Unpaywall and helps gather information related to the open access (OA) status of the item. This short course was created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook. If open access is new to you, we recommend checking out Peter Suber’s book Open Access. It’s concise and well written. Although things have changed since it was published in 2012, it’s a great place to start….”
Using R packages to populate IR
“Many institutions have reported that participation rates of article deposit in their IR are low regardless of their various efforts in outreach and engagement. Even when the deposit is mandated, the participation rate can still be quite low.
Once this hurdle was overcome, there is another challenge faced by the IR administrators, ensuring that the version submitted by the researcher is the appropriate version. If it is not, IR administrators would need to take additional steps to correspond with the researcher to obtain the appropriate version. Thus, increasing their administrative work load.
Therefore, some institutions had taken the pro-active initiative to complete the deposit on behalf of their researchers. This certainly is not a small undertaking. However, there are openly available R packages (https://ropensci.org/) that can be used to automate some of the processes. In this page, I will summarize the steps to do that….”
Massive open index of scholarly papers launches
“An ambitious free index of more than 200 million scientific documents that catalogues publication sources, author information and research topics, has been launched.
The index, called OpenAlex after the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt, also aims to chart connections between these data points to create a comprehensive, interlinked database of the global research system, say its founders. The database, which launched on 3 January, is a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a free alternative to subscription-based platforms such as Scopus, Dimensions and Web of Science that was discontinued at the end of 2021.
“It’s just pulling lots of databases together in a clever way,” says Euan Adie, founder of Overton, a London-based firm that tracks the research cited in policy documents. Overton had been getting its data from various sources, including MAG, ORCID, Crossref and directly from publishers, but has now switched to using only OpenAlex, in the hope of making the process easier….”
Open Science nonprofit OurResearch receives $4.5M grant from Arcadia Fund – OurResearch blog
“The grant, which follows an 2018 award for $850,000, will help expand two existing open-source software projects, as well as support the launch of two new ones:
Unpaywall, launched in 2017, has become the world’s most-used index of Open Access (OA) scholarly papers. The free Unpaywall extension has 400,000 active users, and its underlying database powers OA-related features in dozens of other tools including Web of Science, Scopus, and the European Open Science Monitor. All Unpaywall data is free and open.
Unsub is an analytics dashboard that helps academic libraries cancel their large journal subscriptions, freeing up money for OA publishing. Launched in late 2019, Unsub is now used by over 500 major libraries in the US and worldwide, including the national library consortia of Canada, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong, and the UK.
JournalsDB will be a free and open database of scholarly journals. This resource will gather a wide range of data on tens of thousands of journals, emphasizing coverage of emerging open venues.
OpenAlex will be a free and open bibliographic database, cataloging papers, authors, affiliations, citations, and journals. Inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, OpenAlex will strive to create a comprehensive map of the global scholarly conversation. In a recent blog post, the team announced that OpenAlex will be released in time to serve as a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph, whose discontinuation was also recently announced….”
Tilting the balance back towards libraries | Research Information
Jason Priem tells of his hopes for a ‘long-overdue’ change in academic publishing.
“This presents a compelling opportunity for us as OA advocates: by helping libraries quantify the alternatives to toll-access publishing, we can empower librarians to cancel multi-million dollar big deals. This in turn will begin to turn off the faucet of money flowing from universities to toll-access publishing houses. In short: by helping libraries cancel big deals, we can make toll-access publishing less profitable, and accelerate the transition toward universal OA.”
Lost Green OA articles from Semantic Scholar
“Over the last two weeks, one of the largest repositories we index, Semantic Scholar, removed most of the articles it had been hosting. The end result for Unpaywall is that about 1 million formerly Green OA articles are now Closed. This is about 12% of all Green OA. We’re working on finding new locations for as many articles as we can.
The total number of articles removed from Semantic Scholar was about 8 million, but most of them are still OA because we had other locations….”
Open Access surpasses subscription publication globally for the first time | Dimensions
“In the vein of keeping things moving, the Dimensions team has introduced many new features over the last few years. Most recently, they have updated the Open Access classifications in Dimensions and introduced some additional fields that some of you may find helpful.
The Open Access data in Dimensions is sourced from our colleagues at Unpaywall. When we first launched Dimensions, Unpaywall was almost as new as we were, but in the meanwhile, both Unpaywall and Dimensions have moved on. The new release of Dimensions now tracks the Unpaywall OA classifications. This means that the filters in Dimensions should be more consistent and easier to understand – we now have: Green, Bronze, Gold, Hybrid, All OA and Closed. Of course, all the Open Access filters are available in the free version of Dimensions as well.
While we have seen the percentage of OA increasing rapidly in recent years, especially in countries like China, Germany and the UK, it was not until 2020 that more outputs were published through Open Access channels than traditional subscription channels globally….”
Open Access Helper
“There are more than 25 million Open Access versions of otherwise “paywalled” scientific articles, however they are often not easy to find.
Open Access Helper for iOS & macOS is designed to help you get easy access to these documents, with a lot of help from some amazing APIs….
Open Access Helper is designed to make finding the best Open Access location easy. Whenever my app comes across a DOI, it will query the APIs of unpaywall.org & core.ac.uk to see if an Open Access copy is available elsewhere.
The App is free and Open Source and I have no intention to change that….”
Streamline your writing — and collaborations — with these reference managers
“Zotero includes plug-ins that find PDFs using the Open Access database Unpaywall, and that flag retracted articles, thanks to a partnership with the Retraction Watch blog….”
News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals – Delta Think
“We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant….
Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts….
Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing….
Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.”
News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals – Delta Think
“We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant….
Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts….
Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing….
Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.”