Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Scholars have unprecedented access to subscription and open access (OA) content, yet figuring out how to discover and access legitimate versions of articles remains an aggravating experience for many researchers. They face authentication hoops, myriad vendor platforms with uncertain holdings, and mystifying an obscure OA source. Researchers that start with Google Scholar may bypass library authentication and face paywalls. Conversely, library discovery tools fail to expose and deliver much of the available OA content, and especially under-represent Green OA from repositories. Our panel discusses several approaches to improving access discovery by giving scholars tools to identify accessible content and using open access versions of articles, including oaDOI, and the plugins Unpaywall and Kopernio. The oaDOI system is a free, open-source database that tracks OA for 90 million scholarly articles. Unpaywall is a browser extension that helps readers find OA copies of scholarly articles as they browse. Kopernio is a browser extension that provides one-click access to the best PDF available to a user, either from library holdings or OA. Hear from each developer describing their plugin, how it works, and the underlying philosophy and aims, and future plans. Get additional approaches to revealing access, and explore the impact of increased discoverability on the place of OA in scholarly research. Consider the role of libraries in promoting plugins to researchers, approaches to assessment, and coordinating the tools with existing library technologies.