This post is intended to help the scientific research community and the library professionals involved in making every effort for enabling the research community in accessing more and more research results that are behind the paywall or beyond the paywall.
While doing a literature search, not only the research papers are restricted to access due to the paywall, also some search platforms for scientific articles (like Web of Science and Scopus) are also required to have subscription licenses. There are institutions/ universities that are unable to get licenses due to less funding. In this case, Scientific discoveries are left undiscovered, which make the foundation of further research.
Here are some tools that help you discover relevant literature, quickly find open access versions of papers, and save citations.
ScienceOpen offers open access journal hosting services. It is an interactive research platform for scholars providing advanced search and discovery functions, combined with post-publication peer review, recommendation, social sharing, and collection-building features. It is freely accessible for all and also offers promotional services within the platform for publishers and institutes. Search results display the type of publication, the number of citations and altmetrics scores, etc. and many filter features are also available.
Browser Extensions for Scholarly search
It is an open source tool to deliver free, legal, full text articles instantly. When you enter the URL, DOI, title or citation, it delivers you instantly the free and open access version of an article by searching everywhere for example, preprint repositories, authors' personal page, Open access journals and from other sources. If they can't get the access then Open Access Buttons starts a request for the needed article from the authors and guide them for making it available for you and others who need the article.
Open Access Button is also available as browser plug-in tool, button appears next to an article when a free version is available.
An Unpaywall is a project of Our Research that make free and open-source tools used worldwide, to make the research more open. It is like Open Science Button, a legal tool to search the scholarly literature but only available as a browser plug-in.