All posts tagged with unpaywall

The BHL Tech Team is pleased to announce a new form of content available in BHL: Article PDFs. While this may not sound like anything new, after all, we have had a tool to download PDF content for some time, this update changes both how the PDFs are created and maintained, and how BHL is viewed by content aggregators on the internet, most notably Unpaywall.

In October 2020, BHL launched a new working group with a momentous goal: to make the content on BHL persistently discoverable, citable and trackable using DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).

A DOI is like an electronic fingerprint in the form of a unique and permanent alphanumeric string that provides a persistent link to a piece of content online. Modern publications receive a DOI at the point of publication. A DOI is a key part of a publication’s bibliographic metadata and should be included in any mention or citation of that publication. Reference lists in modern publications are filled with DOIs, which allows readers to click from publication to publication in (in theory) a never-ending chain of knowledge.

Unpaywall finds (legally) open access versions of paywalled literature. Thanks to the work of Richard Orr, Unpaywall’s Lead Developer, BHL is now one of the sources indexed in Unpaywall’s database. As of this week, 43,000 journal articles on the BHL website are now discoverable via Unpaywall.