Unpaywall: The Browser Add-on That Finds (Legal) Free Copies Of Academic Papers

Techdirt has just written about ResearchGate, which claims to offer access to 100 million academic papers. However, as we wrote, there's an issue about whether a significant proportion of those articles are in fact unauthorized copies, for example uploaded by the authors but in contravention of the agreement they signed with publishers. The same legal issues plague the well-known Sci-Hub site, which may deter some from using it. But as further evidence of how the demand for access to millions of academic papers still locked away is driving technical innovation, there's a new option, called Unpaywall, which is available as a pre-release add-on for Chrome (Firefox is promised later), and is free. It aims to provide access to every paper that's freely available to read in an authorized version.