“Unsub is the game-changing data analysis service that is helping librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal. Unsub (known as Unpaywall Journals until just this week) supports librarians in making independent assessments of the value of their journal subscriptions relative to price paid rather than relying upon publisher-provided data alone. Librarians breaking away from the Big Deal often credit Unsub as a critical component of their strategy. I am grateful to Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, co-founders of Our Research, a small nonprofit organization with an innocuous sounding name that is the provider of Unsub, for taking time to answer some questions for the benefit of the readers of The Scholarly Kitchen. …”
Category Archives: oa.unpaywall
College librarians prepare for looming budget cuts, and journal subscriptions could be in for a trim
“University librarians are preparing for tough times ahead, even though the fiscal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is yet to be fully understood. Could big deals with publishers be on the chopping block? …”
Webinar: Getting up to Speed on Repository Discovery and Deposit Services – COAR
“Having trouble keeping track of the increasing number of discovery services? Want to learn more about how they work, who are their main users, and how to ensure your repository content is visible in these services?
You are invited to participate in a webinar that will feature two of these discovery services: Unpaywall and Open Knowledge Maps, as well as a new service called Share Your Paper, which helps researchers easily deposit their content into repositories. Presenters will give participants an overview of their services and also provide an opportunity for attendees to engage with questions and comments.
Join us for this 1.5 hour long webinar on 25th November, Monday at 8:00 PST, 11:00 EST, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET….”
Unpaywall Journals
“Unpaywall Journals is a data dashboard that combines journal-level citations, downloads, Open Access statistics and more, to help librarians confidently manage their serials collections….”
The Writing on the Unpaywall | Library Babel Fish
“Since it’s Open Access Week, I finally got around to reading a paper I’d bookmarked a few weeks back, “The Future of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis Projecting Open Access Publication and Readership.” Written by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr, the wizards behind Our Research, a non-profit devoted to developing infrastructure for open research, it makes a measured assessment of how much open access research is being read, what form it takes, and whether being published in an open access form makes a difference in readership and (by extension) in impact. Their analysis is based on the Unpaywall data set and access logs from the handy browser extension that lets you see if there is a legit open access version of a paper. (In other words, it doesn’t include papers publishers want to keep behind a paywall, just papers that are open access from the start, open access after a period of time, or open access because the publisher gave authors the explicit right to post them openly.)
Here’s the tl;dr version: more research will be open in future, and research that is open access is more likely to be read. This should surprise no one, but it’s good to have data to back it up….”
The Writing on the Unpaywall | Library Babel Fish
“Since it’s Open Access Week, I finally got around to reading a paper I’d bookmarked a few weeks back, “The Future of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis Projecting Open Access Publication and Readership.” Written by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr, the wizards behind Our Research, a non-profit devoted to developing infrastructure for open research, it makes a measured assessment of how much open access research is being read, what form it takes, and whether being published in an open access form makes a difference in readership and (by extension) in impact. Their analysis is based on the Unpaywall data set and access logs from the handy browser extension that lets you see if there is a legit open access version of a paper. (In other words, it doesn’t include papers publishers want to keep behind a paywall, just papers that are open access from the start, open access after a period of time, or open access because the publisher gave authors the explicit right to post them openly.)
Here’s the tl;dr version: more research will be open in future, and research that is open access is more likely to be read. This should surprise no one, but it’s good to have data to back it up….”
Unpaywall Journals | Unpaywall
“Unpaywall Journals is a data dashboard that combines journal-level citations, downloads, Open Access statistics and more, to help librarians confidently manage their serials collections….
Pull together comprehensive data on open access, read and publish models, and real cost-per-use data in the context of your own serials collection.
Include Open Access
Get journal-level open access details from Unpaywall, the industry leaders in Open Access data.
Connect with APC spending
Automatically determine how much money your institution pays in open access publishing fees to understand your entire spend to publishers.
Anticipate disruptions
Learn how upcoming industry changes such as Plan S, read and publish agreements, and new document delivery pathways will affect your access choices….
Identify cost saving opportunities that work for your institution, given your unique assumptions, usage patterns, and priorities.
Stop paying for free content
Calculate OA-adjusted cost-per-use, excluding OA content when assessing subscription value, and exclude backfile access as well where relevant.
Look ahead five years
Base your decisions on projections of future usage and availability, rather than how things have been. Configure every aspect of the model, to reflect your personal assumptions and risk tolerance–from ILL costs, to the effects of Plan S.
Customize for your institution’s values
Balance your serials budget with your institutions’s needs, weighing citations, authorships, and speed of access as best fits your community….”
News & Views: Have We Reached Peak Hybrid? – Delta Think
“Although it’s still not perfect, the data about scholarly output has improved over the last couple of years. We recently analyzed all 110m records in the Unpaywall data set to see if we could determine the uptake of OA at scale and set it in the context of non-OA output. The results might surprise you….
Even allowing for different methodologies, like-for-like underlying trends appear consistent. It seems that even before the effects of Plan S have fully manifested, hybrid share of output is slowing. Note that the overall number of hybrid articles continues to grow – it’s just that other content types are growing more quickly.
There could be a number of reasons for this. For example, most of the funders pushing for OA rolled out their mandates over the last few years. We may therefore be seeing a natural slow-down as localized silos of OA uptake are nearing saturation. Meanwhile, until mandates in other areas of the world change or appear, further wholesale shift is unlikely….
Further deep analysis of the data lies outside the scope of this piece. But we leave you with one thought. If hybrid share is already in decline, but transformative agreements are on the rise, then will Plan S have the effect of slowing down the very change it’s trying to accelerate?…”
The NIH Open Citation Collection: A public access, broad coverage resource
Abstract: Citation data have remained hidden behind proprietary, restrictive licensing agreements, which raises barriers to entry for analysts wishing to use the data, increases the expense of performing large-scale analyses, and reduces the robustness and reproducibility of the conclusions. For the past several years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) has been aggregating and enhancing citation data that can be shared publicly. Here, we describe the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), a public access database for biomedical research that is made freely available to the community. This dataset, which has been carefully generated from unrestricted data sources such as MedLine, PubMed Central (PMC), and CrossRef, now underlies the citation statistics delivered in the NIH iCite analytic platform. We have also included data from a machine learning pipeline that identifies, extracts, resolves, and disambiguates references from full-text articles available on the internet. Open citation links are available to the public in a major update of iCite (https://icite.od.nih.gov).
The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership | bioRxiv
Understanding the growth of open access (OA) is important for deciding funder policy, subscription allocation, and infrastructure planning. This study analyses the number of papers available as OA over time. The models includes both OA embargo data and the relative growth rates of different OA types over time, based on the OA status of 70 million journal articles published between 1950 and 2019. The study also looks at article usage data, analyzing the proportion of views to OA articles vs views to articles which are closed access. Signal processing techniques are used to model how these viewership patterns change over time. Viewership data is based on 2.8 million uses of the Unpaywall browser extension in July 2019. We found that Green, Gold, and Hybrid papers receive more views than their Closed or Bronze counterparts, particularly Green papers made available within a year of publication. We also found that the proportion of Green, Gold, and Hybrid articles is growing most quickly. In 2019:- 31% of all journal articles are available as OA. – 52% of article views are to OA articles. Given existing trends, we estimate that by 2025: – 44% of all journal articles will be available as OA. – 70% of article views will be to OA articles. The declining relevance of closed access articles is likely to change the landscape of scholarly communication in the years to come.
Scholarly Communication Analytics: Open Access Evidence in Unpaywall
“We investigated more than 31 million scholarly journal articles published between 2008 and 2018 that are indexed in Unpaywall, a widely used open access discovery tool. Using Google BigQuery and R, we determined over 11.6 million journal articles with open access full-text links in Unpaywall, corresponding to an open access share of 37 %. Our data analysis revealed various open access location and evidence types, as well as large overlaps between them, raising important questions about how to responsibly re-use Unpaywall data in bibliometric research and open access monitoring….”
Kopernio, Lean Library, Anywhere Access & other “Access Broker” browser extensions – a roundup & update of current state of play | Musings about librarianship
“It has been over a year in April 2018 since I had the opportunity to present at two panels in conferences alongside experts such as Lisa Hinchliffe, Johan Tilstra (Founder Lean Library), Jason Priem (Cofounder Unpaywall), Ben Kaube (Cofounder Kopernio) on the topic of browser extensions that help users gain quick access to the full text of articles while browsing the web.
They would typically be installed as a browser extension in the user’s web browser, and would activate when they detected the user was on a page with article details and would typically popup a message with a link to where the article full text was available or offer to download the PDF directly for the user.
These browser extensions can be divided into two main categories. Early on many of these extensions such as Unpaywall and Open Access Button focused only on discovery of free to read text only
We eventually started to see the rise of browser extensions (many of which were commerical) such as Kopernio and Lean Library, that extended the idea to finding copies available via institutional subscriptions.
Such extensions aimed to help users conveniently get one-click access to the best verson of the article available to them. This could be very helpful if you didn’t start off your search from a library discovery service or page and was off campus. …”
Unpaywall extension adds 200,000th active user – Impactstory blog
“We’re thrilled to announce that we’re now supporting over 200,000 active users of the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox!…
The extension, which debuted nearly two years ago, helps users find legal, open access copies of paywalled scholarly articles. Since its release, the extension has been used more than 45 million times, finding an open access copy in about half of those. …
However, although the extension gets the press, the database powering the extension is the real star. There are millions of people using the Unpaywall database every day:
- We deliver nearly one million OA papers every day to users worldwide via our open API…that’s 10 papers every second!
- Over 1,600 academic libraries use our SFX integration to automatically find and deliver OA copies of articles when they have no subscription access.
- If you’re using an academic discovery tool, it probably includes Unpaywall data…we’re integrated into Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, WorldCat, Scopus, Dimensions, and many others.
- Our data is used to inform and monitor OA policy at organizations like the US NIH, UK Research and Innovation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the European Open Science Monitor, and many others.
The Unpaywall database gets information from over 50,000 academic journals and 5000 scholarly repositories and archives, tracking OA status for more than 100 million articles. You can access this data for free using our open API, or user our free web-based query tool. Or if you prefer, you can just download the whole database for free….”
This New Browser Plug-in Lets You Access Millions of Scientific Papers For Free
“If you’re of the mindset that knowledge should be freely accessible to as many humans as possible, paywalls for academic journals can be downright frustrating. Now a free browser extension is promising to bust through those paywalls wherever possible….”
Alternative routes to scholarly articles and research outputs
“Many scholarly and peer-reviewed articles can be read open access today on the web. A number of free services and archives have developed tools and services helping users to discover research output in an easy and simple way: through installing a browser extension or plug-in; by using academic search engines and archives, or, by contacting the author directly. In the following text, we list a selection of services and ways to find scientific articles. The choice is yours….”