What does it do?
Open Access Helper is a browser extension, which is designed to assist users during the research process. When the extension encounters a DOI, the following will happen:
- Check Unpaywall.org for Open Access
- Check Core.ac.uk for Open Access [Optional]
- Check EBSCOhost Entitlements API [Optional]
- Check OpenCitations.net for Times Cited counts [Optional]
- Provide a link to Open Access Button or the Institutional Link Resolver [Optional]
Where did you get our settings?
Back in 2020 I manually went through library websites throughout the world and collected this information. At the time I had also reached out to every library, but I fear this might have been misunderstood as Spam or an attempt to sell you something.
As you know finding information about the EZProxy or Link Resolver is not that hard. Libraries are awesome at not hiding information 🙂
Who is using it?
Patrons from around the world are using Open Access Helper. While Open Access Helper does not collect any personal data, the number of times institution settings are polled from my internal API is logged. Here are some of the top institutions from last month:
How can I update these settings
- Check, if your institution is already listed
- Search for your institution
- your domain (e.g. umich.edu, uni-frankfurt.de) will be a great starting point
- Review the information and if it is not correct, you can:
- Click the exclamation mark (triangle), this will simply flag the entry and prompt me to research
- Click the edit icon
- You’ll need to know the Admin E-Mail Address and the fact you are reading this, suggests this wasn’t setup
- Contact me with the right settings
- ideally provide me with a link to verify them
- if you would like to become the admin:
- provide your eMail and a link to a section of your website that helps me confirm that you are indeed a librarian
Please add our settings
If you already checked that your settings are not there, please visit this form to submit your settings. I get an eMail at midnight that tells me about all additions, change requests and reports of broken settings. While this is my hobby, I will try to research within a few business days to get this corrected!
List of supported domains
By default Open Access Helper will offer proxy ANY page the user is at. If you would like to provide a list of supported domains, your user’s experience will be far superior, as the extension will only offer to proxy domains, which are supported by your Proxy Server.
Please contact me to learn more and/or visit this page for an explanation of how it is done.
Update translations
While I have tried hard to make Open Access Helper use suitable labels and text strings, sometimes your users might still find them lacking or they aren’t aligned well with your institutional terminology.
Since August 2023 you can now provide updated translation strings. We use the domain configuration file to achieve this and while there is documentation on this page, please do contact me for assistance!
Who are you? How can this be free?
My name is Claus, I am a father of two beautiful daughters and, if you really want to, you can find out about me by visiting the About page or LinkedIn. Let me save you some time though, I am not all that interesting…
The main reason this is free is that I have a full time job and this is merely my hobby. I take it quite seriously, but as a hobby I can foot the small bills.
