Assessing the Effectiveness of Open Access Finding Tools

Abstract

The open access (OA) movement seeks to ensure that scholarly knowledge is available to anyone with internet access, but being available for free online is of little use if people cannot find open versions. A handful of tools have become available in recent years to help address this problem by searching for an open version of a document whenever a user hits a paywall. This project set out to study how effective four of these tools are when compared to each other and to Google Scholar, which has long been a source of finding OA versions. To do this, the project used Open Access Button, Unpaywall, Lazy Scholar, and Kopernio to search for open versions of 1,000 articles. Results show none of the tools found as many successful hits as Google Scholar, but two of the tools did register unique successful hits, indicating a benefit to incorporating them in searches for OA versions. Some of the tools also include additional features that can further benefit users in their search for accessible scholarly knowledge.

All the research that’s fit to print: Open access and the news media

“…It's also unclear if journalists are aware of the various routes to find green OA articles. Although several studies have shown Google Scholar and tools such as Unpaywall and Open Access Button make this relatively easy and effective, journalists would still need to first be aware of these discovery options (Martín-Martín et al, 2018;Schultz et al, 2019). Finally, some research is starting to show that more privileged scholarly authors -white men in senior positions at research institutions with known prestige and the resources to pay expensive publishing fees -are most likely to pay to publish OA, which almost always includes hybrid OA (Olejniczak & Wilson, 2020).…”

Pushing Past the Paywall: Accessing Open Peer-Reviewed Research

“…Google Scholar searches websites that "consist primarily of scholarly articles-journal papers, conference papers, technical reports, or their drafts, dissertations, pre-prints, post-prints, or abstracts" and make abstracts or whole texts of articles available (Google Scholar, n.d.). With hundreds of millions of records, Google Scholar is the most comprehensive academic search engine available (Gusenbauer, 2019) and has been found to identify the most open-access articles of all search engines with a low rate of false positives (identifying an article as openly accessible when it is actually not; see Duffin, 2020;Gadd et al, 2019;Schultz et al, 2019).…”

Pushing Past the Paywall: Accessing Open Peer-Reviewed Research

“…Google Scholar is a powerful tool for finding scholarly articles that are openly accessible and we recommend using it as your first option. Although Google Scholar identifies most openaccess versions of peer-reviewed articles, it does not identify all (Schultz et al, 2019). Therefore, if an open-access version of an article you are looking for is not found in a Google Scholar search, it is worth trying alternative tools-such as Google, Lazy Scholar, and Open Access Button-to see if an open-access version exists that Google Scholar missed.…”