We’re thrilled to announce that we’re now supporting over 200,000 active users of the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox!

The extension, which debuted nearly two years ago, helps users find legal, open access copies of paywalled scholarly articles. Since its release, the extension has been used more than 45 million times, finding an open access copy in about half of those. We’ve also been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Boing Boing, and Nature (twice).



However, although the extension gets the press, the database powering the extension is the real star. There are millions of people using the Unpaywall database every day:

We deliver nearly one million OA papers every day to users worldwide via our open API…that’s 10 papers every second!

to users worldwide via our open API…that’s 10 papers every second! Over 1,600 academic libraries use our SFX integration to automatically find and deliver OA copies of articles when they have no subscription access.

If you’re using an academic discovery tool, it probably includes Unpaywall data…we’re integrated into Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, WorldCat, Scopus, Dimensions, and many others.

Our data is used to inform and monitor OA policy at organizations like the US NIH, UK Research and Innovation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the European Open Science Monitor, and many others.

The Unpaywall database gets information from over 50,000 academic journals and 5000 scholarly repositories and archives, tracking OA status for more than 100 million articles. You can access this data for free using our open API, or user our free web-based query tool. Or if you prefer, you can just download the whole database for free.

Unpaywall is supported via subscriptions to the Unpaywall Data Feed, a high-throughput pipeline providing weekly updates to our free database dump. Thanks to Data Feed subscribers, Unpaywall is completely self-sustaining and uses no grant funding. That makes us real optimistic about our ability to stick around and provide open infrastructure for lots of other cool projects.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project, and even more, thanks to everyone who has fought for open access. Without y’all, Unpaywall wouldn’t matter. With you: we’re changing the world. Together. Next stop 300k!