Unpaywall uses DOIs to match an article behind a paywall with a freely available version from an index of over 320 million free scholarly articles maintained by nonprofit OpenAlex. Unpaywall crawls tens of thousands of hosting locations, including institutional and disciplinary repositories, academic journal websites, and more. Install the browser extension to check for open versions of any article.

Unpaywall

CORE Discovery browser extension searches OA resources to connect users to freely accessible versions of research behind paywalls. CORE is a research-driven global aggregator that harvests research outputs and offers the largest dataset of open metadata and full text in the world. Their free browser extension allows you to efficiently use the power of this data to discover open research.

CORE Discovery

Google Scholar is probably the largest index of academic literature on the web. While it is not well curated and has some issues, it is often a remarkably valuable and easy to use tool. Linking your U of I Library account makes it possible to check our subscriptions for full text access directly on Google Scholar searches.

• Sign in to Google Scholar with your Gmail / Google account (link in upper right corner).
• Go to your Settings (accessible from the menu button in the upper left corner).
• Click on “Library links”.
• Type “Idaho” in the search box, select both “University of Idaho - U of Idaho - View it” and “Open WorldCat - Library Search” from the list, and click on “Save”.
• Now your Google Scholar search results will show a link “U of Idaho - View it” to access full text items in our subscriptions. Note: Scholar can only cross-check some of our holdings so may not comprehensively list access options.

The Google Scholar Button treats any webpage like an article and looks it up in Google Scholar. It provides shortcuts to some of Google Scholar’s features, like citing articles or other versions, as well as the search engine itself. The particular value of the Google Scholar Button is that you can highlight some chunk of text on a webpage and with a click of the button, you can search for items with that phrasing. It’s an efficient means to finding other articles on related topics reasonably quickly. And since it provides a proxy link for items that the U of I subscribes to, it works as an alternative tool for accessing subscribed content, not just open content.

Google Scholar Button

Lazy Scholar is focused on easing access to content using existing indices, regardless of their openness. It has settings to enable authentication through a proxy server to access material through U of I subscriptions. It collects citation information, scans articles for references and other content, and exports papers to reference manager software. It is maintained by researcher Colby Vorland.

Lazy Scholar