Unpaywall: Legal alternative to Sci-Hub

Browser extension to find legal versions of paywalled academic articles

My local friendly engagement librarian told me about this legal alternative to Sci-Hub for finding articles that your institution may not pay for access to. Maybe everyone knows about it already, but I didn’t.

It’s called Unpaywall by Our Research and is a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome.

Once the extension is installed and you navigate to your article of interest and find you can’t access it, a green padlock to click on will appear (Figure 1) which will take you to the unpaywalled version if it’s available (Figure 2).

N.B. It’s worth refreshing the page if you don’t get a green padlock the first time, sometimes a second search returns a free result.

Figure 1: Paywalled article

Figure 2: Unpaywalled Article