Traditionally, scientific research has been tucked away behind paywalls of academic publishers. Not only is the access to papers often restricted, but subscriptions are required to use many scholarly search engines. This practice discriminates against universities and institutions with little funding who cannot afford the licenses. Closed publishing also makes it hard for people not affiliated with research institutes, such as the public, to learn about scientific discoveries.
Today, the proportion of research that is publicly accessible, at no cost, varies between disciplines. While in the biomedical sciences and mathematics, the majority of research published between 2009 and 2015 was openly accessible, this held true only for around 15 percent of publications in chemistry. Luckily, the interest in open access publishing is steadily increasing and has gained momentum in the past decade or so.
Nowadays, many governmental funding bodies around the world require science resulting from grant money they provided to be available publicly for free. The exact requirements vary and UNESCO is currently developing a framework that specifies standards for the whole area of open science.
Once I started my research on the topic, I was astonished by just how many open science tools already exist! I selected the 10 best tools for you that help you discover relevant literature, allow you to read it and save citations:
SCIENCEOPEN
Want to perform a literature search and don’t want to pay for Web of Science or Scopus or perhaps you are tired of the limited functionality of the free Google Scholar? ScienceOpen is many things, among others, a search platform for scientific articles. Despite being owned by a company, the platform is freely accessible with a visually appealing and functional design. Search results are clearly labelled by type of publication, number of citations, altmetrics scores, etc. and allow for filtering. You can also access citation metrics, i.e. display which publications have cited a certain paper.
READ BY QXMD
Available as an app or in a browser window, Read lets you create a personalised feed that is updated daily with new papers on research topics or from journals of your choice. If there is an openly accessible version of an article, you can read it with one click. If your institution has journal subscriptions, you can also link them to your Read profile. Read has been created by the company QxMD and is free to use.
CITATION GECKO
Citation Gecko is an open source web app developed by Barney Walker that can help you with your literature review. It works in the following way: First you upload about 5-6 "seed papers". The program then extracts all references in and to the seed papers and creates a visual citation network. The nodes are displayed in different colours and sizes, depending on whether the papers are citing a seed paper or are cited by it and how many, respectively. By combing through the network, you can discover new papers that may be relevant for your literature search. You can also increase your network step by step by including more seed papers.
The underlying citation data that Citation Gecko uses is provided by Crossref and Open Citations.
LOCAL CITATION NETWORK
Similar to Citation Gecko, Local Citation Network is an open source tool that helps you discover new literature on your research topic. Local Citation Network was developed by Physician Scientist Tim Wölfle. The tool works best if you feed it with a larger library of seed papers than required for Citation Gecko. Therefore, Wölfle recommends using it at the end of the literature review process to identify papers you may have missed.
RESEARCHRABBIT
As an alternative to Citation Gecko and Local Citation Network, a reader recommended ResearchRabbit. It’s free to use and looks like a versatile piece of software to find literature by building your own citation network. ResearchRabbit lets you add labels to the entries in your network, download PDFs of papers and sign up for email alerts for new papers related to your research topic. Instead of a tool to use only once during your literature search, ResearchRabbit seems to work more like a private scientific library, storing (and connecting) all the papers in your field.
OPEN ACCESS BUTTON
Works like Sci-hub but is legal: You enter the DOI, link or citation of a paper and Open Access Button displays it if freely, accessible anywhere. To find an open access version, Open Access Button searches thousands of repositories, for example, preprint servers, authors’ personal pages, open access journals and other aggregators such as the COnnecting REpositories service based at The Open University in the UK (CORE), the EU-funded OpenAire infrastructure, and the US community initiative, Share.
If the article you are looking for isn’t freely available, Open Access Button asks the author to share it to a repository. You can enter your email address to be notified once it has become available.
Open Access Button is also available as a browser plugin, which means that a button appears next to an article when a free version is available. The tool is funded by non-profit foundations and is open source.
UNPAYWALL
Unpaywall is similar to the Open Access Button but only available as a browser plugin. If the article you are looking at is behind a paywall but freely accessible somewhere else, a green button appears on the right side of the article. Unpaywall is run by the non-profit organisation Our Research who has created a fleet of open science tools. I installed it recently and regret not having done it sooner, it works really smoothly!
ENDNOTE CLICK
Another browser extension that lets you access papers for free, if available, is EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio). As the reference manager, EndNote Click is part of the research analytics company, Clarivate.
EndNote Click claims to be faster than other plugins, bypassing redirects and verification steps. I don’t find the Unpaywall or Open Access Button plugins inconvenient to use but I’d encourage you to try them all out and see what works best for you.
One advantage of EndNote Click that a researcher told me about is the sidebar that appears when opening a paper through the plugin. It lets you, for example, save citations quickly, avoiding time-consuming searches on publishers’ websites.
CITEAS
You discovered a promising paper, read it and now you want to cite it? CiteAs is a convenient tool to obtain the correct citation for any publication, preprint, software or dataset in one click. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, CiteAs is operated partly by the non-profit, Our Research.
There you have it. 10 Open Science tools that help with your literature search!
By the way, my interactive training video, "How to get published in high-ranking journals without lacking structure in the writing process" is now available for you for free! You can schedule your private viewing session here.
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