How often do you hit paywalls? Every week? Every day?
You find an article of interest to ~200 researchers in your sub-field and the publisher wants $39.95 for you to “buy” the article. The research was free to the publisher, usually supported by public grants. The copy editing and peer review was free to the publisher. Yet they are squatting like Cerberus over value they didn’t create.
Not quite Hercules or Virgil but Zotero makes it easier to find open source PDFs to replace those behind firewalls.
Improved PDF retrieval with Unpaywall integration
From the post:
As an organization dedicated to developing free and open-source research tools, we care deeply about open access to scholarship. With the latest version of Zotero, we’re excited to make it easier than ever to find PDFs for the items in your Zotero library.
While Zotero has always been able to download PDFs automatically as you save items from the web, these PDFs are often behind publisher paywalls, putting them out of reach of many people.
Enter Unpaywall, a database of legal, full-text articles hosted by publishers and repositories around the world. Starting in Zotero 5.0.56, if you save an item from a webpage where Zotero can’t find or access a PDF, Zotero will automatically search for an open-access PDF using data from Unpaywall.
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Which reminds me, I need to upgrade my current Zotero installation!
Don’t forget to harry, harass and penalize those who seek to deny access to materials being produced on 17th century economic models. Whatever befalls them, it won’t be severe enough.