More than half of new papers are now free to read
A 2023 analysis found that around 55% of newly published scientific papers are available somewhere online at no cost. The challenge isn't that open access doesn't exist — it's knowing where to look.
Below are the tools researchers actually use, and a few steps to make your own work easier to find.
Where to find free papers
1. Unpaywall
Unpaywall is a browser extension (Chrome / Firefox) that adds a green tab to any journal article page when a legal free version exists. It checks institutional repositories, preprint servers, and author pages automatically. Install it once and forget it — it works in the background.
2. OpenAlex
OpenAlex is an open catalog of over 250 million scholarly works. You can search by author, institution, topic, or citation count. Unlike Google Scholar, it has a public API and no login wall. If you want to find everything a specific researcher has published — including papers behind paywalls that have a free preprint somewhere — OpenAlex is the right starting point.
3. Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar (from the Allen Institute for AI) surfaces papers with AI-generated summaries and shows citation relationships. Useful for quickly judging whether a paper is worth reading in full before tracking down the full text.
4. arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN
For physics, math, and computer science: arXiv. For biology and life sciences: bioRxiv. For social sciences and finance: SSRN. These are preprint servers — papers posted before or alongside formal peer review, always free.
5. Your institution's library portal
Many universities negotiate access to Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley journals. If you're affiliated with a university, remote library access often covers far more than researchers realise — worth checking before paying for anything.
How to make your own research more visible
Post a preprint
Upload your manuscript to a preprint server before or at the time of journal submission. Most journals now explicitly allow this. A preprint gives your work months of visibility before the formal publication process completes — and it's indexed by Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex within days.
Set up your ORCID profile
ORCID gives you a persistent researcher ID that follows you across institutions and name changes. Link your publications once, and tools like OpenAlex and ResearcherCollab can pull them automatically — no manual updating required.
Check your journal's self-archiving policy
Many journals allow authors to deposit the accepted manuscript (not the formatted PDF) in an institutional repository, even when the published version is paywalled. The Sherpa RoMEO database lists these policies by journal. Depositing that accepted version is often the fastest way to make paywalled work freely available.
The part that often gets overlooked
Discoverability isn't only about papers — it's about people. When a researcher finds your work and wants to know more, what do they find? A publication list answers what you've done. A profile that shows your current research focus, institution, and openness to collaboration answers what comes next.
That's the gap ResearcherCollab was built to address: connecting researchers in the same field who haven't met yet, so that the next collaboration starts from a paper someone read rather than a conference someone couldn't attend.
