[Eril-l] Reliable and comprehensive site for OA articles (even just links)?

Mon Jul 7 06:23:59 PDT 2025

I don't know of a comparison but in general Unpaywall is going to connect the user to any open version of articles (gold, green) and GetFTR is going to connect the user to any content that they are entitled to (open or what your library has a subscription to) on the publisher platform. So, Unpaywall leaves out your subscription content but gets the green from repositories and GetFTR leaves out the green from repositories. Both give the user the gold OA content on the publisher platform.

Lisa

P.S. I should have said in my first reply that I am on the GetFTR Advisory Board. I have no specific role with Unpaywall/Our Research but I have written about them on The Scholarly Kitchen. FWIW, GetFTR would very much like to have more librarians on their advisory board.

____

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe

Professor & Coordinator for Research Professional Development, University Library

Affiliate Faculty, School of Information Sciences, Center for Social & Behavioral Science, European Union Center, & Center for Global Studies

Library 434, University of Illinois, 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, Illinois 61801

ljanicke at illinois.edu<mailto:ljanicke at illinois.edu>, 217-333-1323 (v), 217-244-4358 (f)

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Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Reliable and comprehensive site for OA articles (even just links)?

Does anyone know of a comparison between the GetFTR browser extension and the UnPayWall browser extension?
We can't ask our patrons to install multiple such extensions so it would be good to have a sense of which is the better one to ask for.
I admit that this is the first I'm learning of the GetFTR service, and would appreciate unbiased advice and comparisons.

Melissa Belvadi
mbelvadi at upei.ca
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I believe that if EBSCO would implement GetFTR, then there would be GetFTR “smart” article-level links to OA content in hybrid journals.

____

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe

Professor & Coordinator for Research Professional Development, University Library

Affiliate Faculty, School of Information Sciences, Center for Social & Behavioral Science, European Union Center, & Center for Global Studies

Library 434, University of Illinois, 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, Illinois 61801

ljanicke at illinois.edu<mailto:ljanicke at illinois.edu>, 217-333-1323 (v), 217-244-4358 (f)

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Subject: [Eril-l] Reliable and comprehensive site for OA articles (even just links)?

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Hi,

We use EBSCO Discovery Service to manage our holdings as well as discovery. It includes the ability to "select" "packages" of OA journal titles so they show up for easy access alongside our paid holdings in the discovery result records.

We keep running into problems with hybrid journals in those packages causing our patrons to disappointingly hit paywalls for their particular article.

I am considering the option to provide a link on result records to do a search on some other OA-only database that they can use to check for an OA version.

EBSCO already offers us a link for using the Unpaywall API to check there, but it doesn't seem to know about most OA articles. We have DOAJ linked already, but that's also missing a lot.

Is there a free database out there that is doing a really comprehensive job of knowing what OA articles there are, and that I can make a persistent link logic from our citation to it (eg using DOI, openurl syntax, etc.) for patrons to use to check?

I am aware of OpenAlex and Dimensions, but not sure how complete they are.

Ideally, such a "target" would know about the OA articles within hybrid journals without sending users to the paywalled articles in those journals.

I am also aware of the Unpaywall browser plugin but we have had very poor uptake of solutions that require the patron to install something.

Any ideas, advice, suggestions, etc. that you can offer would be most welcome!

Melissa Belvadi

Collections Librarian

University of Prince Edward Island

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