Looking for something to read that’s scholarly and academic? I found this list shared of open access journals worth exploring:

• Portal Garuda
• Arxiv by Cornell University
• PLOS Journals
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• Vixra

via Ade Malsasa Akbar

I’m not sure I’ll make much progress on some of these journals…they are about topics that are over my head. 

🙂

UnPayWall

Some time ago, I wrote about how to bypass the paywalls you encounter everywhere. See that entry in this blog, Three Ways to Avoid Pop-Ups When Reading Online. I ran across this add-on for Chrome, UnPayWall, that asserts it can bypass paywalls. And, it’s also available for Firefox.

Unpaywall finds the kind of articles you’d see in peer-reviewed scholarly journals like Science or PLOS One, plus pre-publication versions of similar work from preprint repositories like arXiv. Specifically, it looks for articles with a kind of identifier called a DOI. Although the best-known type of paywall is the kind in front of a newspaper or magazine article you want to read, Unpaywall doesn’t help with sites like nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com.

And, if you’re wondering, “Is this legal?” their answer is:

Yes! We harvest content from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves. We do not harvest from sources of dubious legality like ResearchGate or Sci-Hub. If you ever encounter content indexed by Unpaywall that is posted in violation of copyright, let us know and we’ll remove it immediately.

Not bad, eh? The perfect companion to open access journals listed here.