Effortless legal access to full text scholarly articles:
Open Access Helper will help you identify legal open access copies of academic articles, using unpaywall.org and core.ac.uk

Open Access Helper: Effortless Access to Scholarly Articles
Open Access Helper is a Firefox add-on that helps you effortlessly access legal open access copies of academic articles. It detects the DOI of a research article and queries the APIs of unpaywall.org and core.ac.uk to find a link for an open access copy. The extension also supports EZProxy for university libraries and ensures the links are legal and secure.
Add-on stats
Manifest V2
Rating: 5.00
(1)
Weekly download count: 16
Firefox on Android: No
Permissions:
- tabs
- storage
- contextMenus
- http://*/*
- https://*/*
- *://*/*
- https://www.oahelper.org/backend/institutes/
Size: 424.99K
Email: in*****@oahelper.org
URLs: Website ,Privacy policy
Full description: See detailed description
Ranking
Other platforms
Not available on Android
User reviews
Great upgrade to the unpaywall extension!
Since I am/was a user of that extension, OAHelper's color scheme confused me: I associated a green badge with green Open Access, i.e. the OA version is available at a different location; and a gold badge with gold Open Access, i.e. it is available "here" at the publisher. OAHelper does it the other way around, which is based on a different philosophy (green = all is good, stay here; orange = oops, you don't get it here). But given that OA levels are associated with colors, did you consider to flip those two colors - or provide an option in the settings?
I have a feature request: the unpaywall extension treated the link in the badge as a regular link, so that on hover, one could see the target URL in the status bar. OAHelper does that different, so that one has to click the badge to know where it leads. Any plans to make it a regular link like the unpaywall extension did?
Thanks for your work! Highly appreciated.
by Firefox user 14952072, 2022-11-06
Add-on safety
Risk impact
Open Access Helper requires some sensitive permissions that could impact your browser and data security. Exercise caution before installing.
Risk impact analysis details
- Critical Grants access to browser tabs, which can be used to track user browsing habits and history, presenting a privacy concern.
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Risk likelihood
We don't have sufficient data to confidently determine the risk likelihood of Open Access Helper. Use it at your own risk.
Risk likelihood analysis details
- High This extension has low user count. Unpopular extensions may not be stable or safe.
- Medium **** ********* *** ******* ** *** **** * ******* *** ******* *** *** ** ****** ** *****
- Low **** ********* *** ***** **** **** * ****** **** ***** ********** *** **** ****** ** ** ****** *** *****
- Good **** ********* *** **** **** *******
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