#unpaywall

My extension bar, for context. I’ll only mention the ones I find most important, numbered by their position left to right. 

1. Adblock Plus: You’ve probably heard of this one. Adblockers are just useful in general.

4. Kick Ass!: Ever wanted to shoot a webpage? This extension lets you control a spaceship reminiscent of the game Asteroids as you take down elements on the webpage.

5. Video Speed Controller: Have full control over video playback speed on pretty much any embedded video on the internet. 

7. Ublock Origin: The other major adblocker. I use both just to be safe.

9. SponsorBlock: Tired of sitting through sponsor segments, intro animations, reminders to like and subscribe, or other disinteresting content in youtube videos? This extension uses user-submitted timestamps to skip those sorts of things. 

11. IE Tab: Something’s not loading in Chrome but you’re too lazy to switch browsers? Just emulate an Internet Explorer tab in Chrome.

12. Bot Sentinel: If you use Twitter a lot in your browser, this one is for you. It checks twitter accounts and gives them a rating on how likely they are to be bots, inauthentic accounts, or toxic twitter trolls.

13. Unpaywall: If you do a lot of research, try Unpaywall. When you view a paywalled scholarly article, Unpaywall tries to find a free copy for you instead.

14. Shinigami Eyes: If you’re trans or trans-supporting, check this one out! Use it to check and/or mark pro- or anti-trans search results, twitter/reddit/tumblr/youtube accounts, and a whole bunch more. It’s just nice to check before interacting.

15. Google Translate: Too lazy to copy and paste text in a foreign language into a google translate tab? Just highlight the text and the extension will do the rest.

If you're of the mindset that knowledge should be freely accessible to as many humans as possible, paywalls for academic journals can be downright frustrating. Now a free browser extension is promising to bust through those paywalls wherever possible.

Unpaywall was launched earlier this month by the open source not-for-profit Impactstory – funded by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – and it's already making a splash in the traditional publishing industry.

Install the plug-in on your Chrome or Firefox desktop browser, and it will start displaying a little lock symbol whenever you're on the landing page of an article in an academic journal.

If the plug-in can find a freely accessible full-text copy of the paper you're looking at, the lock symbol turns from grey to green, and you can simply click on it to get the PDF. If the lock is gold, the article you're reading already has an open access licence.

Finally making the transition to firefox.