Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

unpaywall.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#21

Post by biofox »

teruakohatu wrote: post #4
jleyank wrote: post #2

Isn’t this what google scholar was supposed to be about? Hope they figure out how to monetize this before the cash runs out because a properly curated, non fire hose kind of source would be great. Particularly if scientific publishing continues to shift to open source vs. Paywalled.

I use Google Scholar frequently because it is far better and easier to login to than propriety databases like Scopus. I think it is miles ahead. I really do fear it is next on Google discontinue list. They cannot be making any money from it.

Losing Google Scholar would be devastating to research productivity in all fields. Academic databases are critical infrastructure for science.

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#23

Post by Vinnl »

jleyank wrote: post #2

Isn’t this what google scholar was supposed to be about? Hope they figure out how to monetize this before the cash runs out because a properly curated, non fire hose kind of source would be great. Particularly if scientific publishing continues to shift to open source vs. Paywalled.

They've at least figured out a way to make this sustainable, as they've been going at Unpaywall for quite a few years now, and also have a bunch of other cool projects: https://ourresearch.org/

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#24

Post by LittlePeter »

lovelearning wrote: post #5

For some reason, I expected a big search box for articles on the front page. It exists at http://unpaywall.org/articles but the link's hidden away at the very bottom of the page.

Me too. It's like they don't want people to use their website. Strange decision.

Put the search box on top, and all the secondary fluff at the bottom.

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#26

Post by occamrazor »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #25
_Algernon_ wrote: post #22

I'm gonna stick with scihub to be honest

Yeah, it seems a lot more well-known and I'd rather give my attention to something that isn't a copycat of hard work.

I wouldn’t call Unpaywall a copycat of sci-hub. Unpaywall helps finding links to the same article hosted elsewhere, e.g. on a preprint server or on the author’s page. It is more similar to specific features of Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar, with the small additional convenience of appearing directly on the article web page, instead of requiring a search.

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#27

Post by derbOac »

teruakohatu wrote: post #4
jleyank wrote: post #2

Isn’t this what google scholar was supposed to be about? Hope they figure out how to monetize this before the cash runs out because a properly curated, non fire hose kind of source would be great. Particularly if scientific publishing continues to shift to open source vs. Paywalled.

I use Google Scholar frequently because it is far better and easier to login to than propriety databases like Scopus. I think it is miles ahead. I really do fear it is next on Google discontinue list. They cannot be making any money from it.

I've noticed recently that the trend of Google not returning links older than a certain age has started to extend to articles in open access archives, and maybe to published articles as well.

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#28

Post by davis_running »

occamrazor wrote: post #26
kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it seems a lot more well-known and I'd rather give my attention to something that isn't a copycat of hard work.

I wouldn’t call Unpaywall a copycat of sci-hub. Unpaywall helps finding links to the same article hosted elsewhere, e.g. on a preprint server or on the author’s page. It is more similar to specific features of Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar, with the small additional convenience of appearing directly on the article web page, instead of requiring a search.

I'd probably use Scihub for a quick download for a paper I'm interested in reading. And then if I wanted to share it publicly or with coworkers I might use Unpaywall.

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#29

Post by bouchard »

davis_running wrote: post #28
occamrazor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t call Unpaywall a copycat of sci-hub. Unpaywall helps finding links to the same article hosted elsewhere, e.g. on a preprint server or on the author’s page. It is more similar to specific features of Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar, with the small additional convenience of appearing directly on the article web page, instead of requiring a search.

I'd probably use Scihub for a quick download for a paper I'm interested in reading. And then if I wanted to share it publicly or with coworkers I might use Unpaywall.

Just yesterday Unpaywall found a publicly available copy of a 1980s article I was looking for and which Sci-hub didn't have.

Re: Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles

#30

Post by uptime »

Hot take: Google Scholar is content collected means of donated human and robot indexers. It is not a database or service until they have an API that allows us to harvest. Yes I am salty af about it. It is taking energy away from curating ORCID records and the like.
Post reply on HN