Foreword

What is Unpaywall?

Unpaywall searches for open access full-text copies of scholarly literature and offers various open-source tools to work with them. More specifically, Unpaywall, a non-profit service builded and maintained by Our Research, provides metadata about free-to-read versions of scientific publications such as research papers and journal articles [1].

These metadata information is stored in a large database that contains several million records. The data can be queried either using a provided database snapshot which is around 100GB in size, or via the Unpaywall REST API.

The REST API returns a JSON data structure which contains information about a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) like open access status, title and full-text link. For a detailed schema description see Data Format.

Project background

We use Unpaywall in different contexts. On the one hand, we use Unpaywall to examine the proportion of open access articles in journals and repositories. For that, we provide a pandas integration to easily create DataFrames that can be used for bibliometric research. Besides, our package provides convenient functions for literature mining such as downloading pdf handles or retrieving full-text links.

Our Goal is to develop a tiny Python wrapper around the Unpaywall REST API to make interactions between Python and Unpaywall even more comfortable and less time consuming as it already is.

References

[1]	https://peerj.com/articles/4375/