Open Access Helper

Open Access Helper will identify > 28 million free scholarly articles from over 50,000 publishers and repositories to help you overcome the paywall imposed by many scholarly publishers, right from your iPhone or iPad. Each Open Access copy found within the app is legal and trustworthy. Privacy and transparency is important to me, so please read on to learn more.

SETUP

You'll get the most out of this app, if you use the iOS Action Sheet!

After installing the app, go to Safari, select the Share Icon and swipe all the way to the bottom until you see the option to manage extensions and ensure to enable OA Helper from there and move it to an easy to access location.

WHAT DOES IT DO

The app identifies the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of a scientific article and queries unpaywall.org and core.ac.uk API for a legal Open Access copy, based on the identified DOI. If one is found, you will get a clear indication, including a preview of the URL where the Open Access copy will be located.

The app itself, will allow you to query core.ac.uk or Europe PMC to see results and access Open Access version of documents based on your search terms.

For users of institutions with EZproxy remote access, the app can help you reload the current page via the proxy of your institution. Remember to set this up in settings.

Lastly, if you use Zotero, the Open Source bibliographic management tool, you can now save references to Zotero, right from the Action Sheet.

PRIVACY PROMISE

I, as the developer of the app, get none of your data. All the app logic happens within your device. Subsequently, I have no metrics to help app development and thus rely on your direct feedback. As I have virtually no metrics, I also have nothing to sell - to me this is a clear privacy win!

Please note, that since version:

• 2021.5 implements core.ac.uk V3 api, meaning that recommendations are no longer fetched through an intermediate service, but directly, enhancing your privacy along the way

• 2021.3 I offer support for Zotero. If you use this option, we will use OAuth to obtain an API key and store within the device and use this whenever you request to bookmark a document

• 2020.1 I offer support for EZProxy. If you use this option all traffic will be sent via your institution's proxy server

• 2019.12 I offer support for "Similar Articles". Due to the complexity of implementing this feature, it uses code on my web server and the server is setup to cache requests for one week to serve repeat requests fare more quickly.

• 2019.11 we offer the ability to request an article via "Open Access Button", if you chose to do so, please note the privacy policy of the service provider (OpenAccessButton.org)

• 1.5 you can elect to share some very basic metrics with me, which will not affect your privacy. You are in full control over whether these are shared or not. The default is on. This was removed in version 2020.4

You don't need to trust my word for this privacy promise. The code for the app is on GitHub and I invite you to check it out. Visit the Website / Support links to access the app homepage and navigate from there to the Github repository.

If you wonder, how I make money on this, there is an easy answer: I don't. This is my hobby and I am really enjoying it! I am learning a lot with every new version, so that's my reward and if you were to drop me an eMail with a suggestion or two, that would also count as a reward...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the providers of core.ac.uk, europepmc.org, openaccessbutton.org, opencitations.net, unpaywall.org, and zotero.org for providing awesome services to the scientific community worldwide, without which the app would do very little.