About Unpaywall

Unpaywall, developed and maintained by the team of OurResearch, is a non-profit service that finds open access copies of scholarly literature by looking up a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). It not only returns open access full-text links, but also helpful metadata about the open access status of a publication such as licensing or provenance information.

Unpaywall uses different data sources to find open access full-texts including:

See Piwowar et al. (2018) for a comprehensive overview of Unpaywall.

Basic usage

There is one major function to talk with Unpaywall, oadoi_fetch(), taking a character vector of DOIs and your email address as required arguments.

library(roadoi)
roadoi::oadoi_fetch(dois = c("10.1186/s12864-016-2566-9",
                             "10.1103/physreve.88.012814"),
                    email = "najko.jahn@gmail.com")
## # A tibble: 2 × 21
##   doi           best_oa_location  oa_locations  oa_locations_emba…
##   <chr>         <list>            <list>        <list>            
## 1 10.1186/s128… <tibble [1 × 10]> <tibble [5 ×… <tibble [0 × 0]>  
## 2 10.1103/phys… <tibble [1 × 10]> <tibble [2 ×… <tibble [0 × 0]>  
## # … with 17 more variables: data_standard <int>, is_oa <lgl>,
## #   is_paratext <lgl>, genre <chr>, oa_status <chr>,
## #   has_repository_copy <lgl>, journal_is_oa <lgl>,
## #   journal_is_in_doaj <lgl>, journal_issns <chr>,
## #   journal_issn_l <chr>, journal_name <chr>, publisher <chr>,
## #   published_date <chr>, year <chr>, title <chr>,
## #   updated_resource <chr>, authors <list>

What’s returned?

The client supports API version 2. According to the Unpaywall Data Format, the following variables with the following definitions are returned:

Column Description
doi DOI (always in lowercase)
best_oa_location list-column describing the best OA location. Algorithm prioritizes publisher hosted content (e.g. Hybrid or Gold)
oa_locations list-column of all the OA locations.
oa_locations_embargoed list-column of locations expected to be available in the future based on information like license metadata and journals’ delayed OA policies
data_standard Indicates the data collection approaches used for this resource. 1 mostly uses Crossref for hybrid detection. 2 uses more comprehensive hybrid detection methods.
is_oa Is there an OA copy (logical)?
is_paratext Is the item an ancillary part of a journal, like a table of contents? See here for more information https://support.unpaywall.org/support/solutions/articles/44001894783.
genre Publication type
oa_status Classifies OA resources by location and license terms as one of: gold, hybrid, bronze, green or closed. See here for more information https://support.unpaywall.org/support/solutions/articles/44001777288-what-do-the-types-of-oa-status-green-gold-hybrid-and-bronze-mean-.
has_repository_copy Is a full-text available in a repository?
journal_is_oa Is the article published in a fully OA journal? Uses the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as source.
journal_is_in_doaj Is the journal listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
journal_issns ISSNs, i.e. unique code to identify journals.
journal_issn_l Linking ISSN.
journal_name Journal title
publisher Publisher
published_date Date published
year Year published.
title Publication title.
updated_resource Time when the data for this resource was last updated.
authors Lists authors (if available)

The columns best_oa_location and oa_locations are list-columns that contain useful metadata about the OA sources found by Unpaywall These are

Column Description
endpoint_id Unique repository identifier
evidence How the OA location was found and is characterized by Unpaywall?
host_type OA full-text provided by publisher or repository.
is_best Is this location the for its resource?
license The license under which this copy is published
oa_date When this document first became available at this location
pmh_id OAI-PMH endpoint where we found this location
repository_institution Hosting institution of the repository.
updated Time when the data for this location was last updated
url The URL where you can find this OA copy.
url_for_landing_page The URL for a landing page describing this OA copy.
url_for_pdf The URL with a PDF version of this OA copy.
versions The content version accessible at this location following the DRIVER 2.0 Guidelines (https://wiki.surfnet.nl/display/DRIVERguidelines/DRIVER-VERSION+Mappings)

The Unpaywall schema is also described here: https://unpaywall.org/data-format.

The columns best_oa_location. oa_locations and oa_locations_embargoed are list-columns that contain useful metadata about the OA sources found by Unpaywall.

If .flatten = TRUE the list-column oa_locations will be restructured in a long format where each OA fulltext is represented by one row, which allows to take into account all OA locations found by Unpaywall in a data analysis.

library(dplyr)
roadoi::oadoi_fetch(dois = c("10.1186/s12864-016-2566-9",
                             "10.1103/physreve.88.012814",
                             "10.1093/reseval/rvaa038",
                             "10.1101/2020.05.22.111294",
                             "10.1093/bioinformatics/btw541"),
                    email = "najko.jahn@gmail.com", .flatten = TRUE) %>%
  dplyr::count(is_oa, evidence, is_best)
## # A tibble: 8 × 4
##   is_oa evidence                                     is_best     n
##   <lgl> <chr>                                        <lgl>   <int>
## 1 FALSE <NA>                                         NA          1
## 2 TRUE  oa journal (via doaj)                        TRUE        2
## 3 TRUE  oa repository (semantic scholar lookup)      FALSE       1
## 4 TRUE  oa repository (via OAI-PMH doi match)        FALSE       7
## 5 TRUE  oa repository (via page says license)        FALSE       1
## 6 TRUE  oa repository (via pmcid lookup)             FALSE       2
## 7 TRUE  open (via crossref license, author manuscri… TRUE        1
## 8 TRUE  open (via page says license)                 TRUE        1

Any API restrictions?

There are no API restrictions. However, Unpaywall requires an email address when using its API. If you are too tired to type in your email address every time, you can store the email in the .Renviron file with the option roadoi_email

roadoi_email = "najko.jahn@gmail.com"

You can open your .Renviron file calling

file.edit("~/.Renviron")`

Save the file and restart your R session. To stop sharing the email when using roadoi, delete it from your .Renviron file.

Keeping track of crawling

To follow your API call, and to estimate the time until completion, use the .progress parameter inherited from plyr to display a progress bar.

roadoi::oadoi_fetch(dois = c("10.1186/s12864-016-2566-9",
                             "10.1103/physreve.88.012814"),
                    email = "najko.jahn@gmail.com",
                    .progress = "text")
## 
  |                                                              
  |                                                        |   0%
  |                                                              
  |============================                            |  50%
  |                                                              
  |========================================================| 100%
## # A tibble: 2 × 21
##   doi           best_oa_location  oa_locations  oa_locations_emba…
##   <chr>         <list>            <list>        <list>            
## 1 10.1186/s128… <tibble [1 × 10]> <tibble [5 ×… <tibble [0 × 0]>  
## 2 10.1103/phys… <tibble [1 × 10]> <tibble [2 ×… <tibble [0 × 0]>  
## # … with 17 more variables: data_standard <int>, is_oa <lgl>,
## #   is_paratext <lgl>, genre <chr>, oa_status <chr>,
## #   has_repository_copy <lgl>, journal_is_oa <lgl>,
## #   journal_is_in_doaj <lgl>, journal_issns <chr>,
## #   journal_issn_l <chr>, journal_name <chr>, publisher <chr>,
## #   published_date <chr>, year <chr>, title <chr>,
## #   updated_resource <chr>, authors <list>

References

Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., … Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375