Scaling up paywalled academic article sharing by legal means
Open Knowledge Finland - August 23, 2018 in Featured, Open Access, Open Science, r4r
“If you read a paper, 100% goes to the publisher. If you just email us to ask for our papers, we are allowed to send them to you for free, and will be genuinely delighted to do so.”
This recent tweet by Holly Witteman inspired Iris.ai to launch the R4R initiative (Research for Researchers) that is intended to facilitate sharing of research articles by legal means.
This is implemented as an application that automates article requests and sharing among researchers via email. Sharing an article you authored via email with your peers is generally allowed. While being far from the most efficient way to share knowledge, email still remains the last resort when the alternative is that content is behind an expensive paywall.
Technically, R4R is a fairly simple tool, implemented as a browser extension. The Iris.ai blog post explains it in more detail, but here’s the idea in a nutshell:
The post Scaling up paywalled academic article sharing by legal means appeared first on Open Knowledge Finland.
- Imagine you just found an interesting academic paper using search engines. It’s relevant, but behind a paywall.
- Having installed the R4R browser extension, a tab on your screen will let you know if sending an email to the author automatically is available. A single click on the tab sends an email requesting the paper to the author.
- R4R automatically drafts a response to the person requesting the paper and adds the relevant scholarly article as an attachment.
- The author reviews the request and makes the final decision on whether or not to share the paper with the requester.
