Unpaywall FAQ

How is the best OA location determined?
When an article has more than one OA location, we need to decide which is the most current, authoritative version, which is first in oa_locations and is cal...
Tue, 19 Jan, 2021 at 8:59 AM
How do I use the title search API?
Unpaywall Title Search Endpoint The Unpaywall title search endpoint gives you the full DOI API response for articles with titles match...
Wed, 4 Aug, 2021 at 11:54 AM
What is an OA license?
There are many definitions of what constitutes an OA license, including the BOAI, OSI and SPARC (for a more comprehensive list, see this literature review)....
Tue, 5 Jan, 2021 at 10:54 AM
What does oa_date mean and how is it determined?
In each oa_location, the purpose of oa_date is to tell you when the full text of this version of the article was first available at this location. Here’s an...
Mon, 19 Oct, 2020 at 11:15 AM
What counts as an Open Access location?
We're pretty flexible. In general, if a page makes the full text of an article available for free, either directly on the page, through a PDF link, or i...
Thu, 31 Dec, 2020 at 1:45 PM
What do the host_type values "publisher" and "repository" mean?
In general, publisher means this location is provided by the article's original publisher, through the canonical doi.org URL, as a Published or Accepted...
Thu, 31 Dec, 2020 at 1:45 PM
What do the fields in the API response and snapshot records mean?
Glad you asked! Documentation for the shared schema is here: https://unpaywall.org/data-format And the field names are listed here so this article appea...
Tue, 12 Jan, 2021 at 1:28 PM
How do I make the Unpaywall extension work on my site?
The Unpaywall browser extension gets open access locations by calling our REST API. The API is called using DOIs, so the extension needs to be able to find ...
Mon, 8 Mar, 2021 at 10:07 AM
Preventing Code Injection - Using Text From Unpaywall Safely
Some fields in Unpaywall records include text from external sources like Crossref. If you're simply viewing an Unpaywall API response in a browser or re...
Thu, 10 Jun, 2021 at 11:56 AM