Ask any researcher and they will tell you the pains associated with literature search and discovery. Millions of papers are published every year and staying on top of the latest developments in your field has become a near impossible task. Timely research discovery is critical, which is why R Discovery, a literature search and research reading app, is continually expanding its content bank! Today, its library boasts of over 100 million research papers, including more than 39 million open access articles and over 2 million preprints. This makes R Discovery one of the world’s largest content repositories for researchers, with the highest number of open access articles available across any platform.
Challenges with access as part of the literature search process
The literature search process can be exhausting; one study suggests that researchers typically spend more than 4 hours a week finding the right research papers and a little over 5 hours reading them, with only half of these being useful.1 And often finding the right paper is only half the battle won. After all the time and effort put into finding the right research paper, you realize that it is behind a paywall.
This initiates a rigorous exercise to get full-text access of the research paper via your institution’s library subscription (if there is one) or trying to find a version of the paper that is freely available online. Even if you are able to find a version of the full text paper online, there’s rarely any information regarding which version it is; i.e., is it a preprint, the version submitted, or the final published version. If the full-text paper is not the published version of record, you may never know what has changed between this version and the final version.
With the biggest library of full-text open access articles, R Discovery helps users not only discover the right content to read (via its adaptable AI algorithm), but its GetFTR and Libkey integrations also allow them to access full-text published papers behind paywalls using their institutional credentials.
What we are doing to make research more accessible
R Discovery hosts more than 100 million journal articles today and is working to further expand its library by partnering with different aggregators and publishing houses. Our research bank is currently built on content from top aggregators like CrossRef and PubMed as well as leading publishers like Springer Nature, IOP, Taylor and Francis, NEJM, AIAA, and Karger, among others. We recently signed a content partnership with Unpaywall which allows us to continually ingest open access articles into our data pipeline. We’re also in conversations with leading open access publishers like Hindawi, PLOS, and MDPI to further improve our coverage of open access papers!
R Discovery also has the largest library of preprints, with over 2 million papers from preprint repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv and chemRxiv. The best part is that while we’re ingesting hundreds of research papers and content every day, we’re also regularly working to ensure our growing library has the cleanest research content from the most trusted sources, with efforts such as de-duplication, disambiguation and much more.
How to access open access papers on R Discovery
If you’re looking to browse through open access articles relevant to your research, simply follow the easy steps mentioned below.
Home feed tags articles as open access
Open access articles on the Home Feed have been tagged as “Open Access” so that users can identify those papers easily. Once you click on an open access article on the Home Feed, you have the option to see more details around the article. To access the full text content, user can click on “Full Text Option” to see the available options. Users can choose to view the published version of the open access article or even click “Download PDF” to download it on their device.
Search and filter out open access papers
Users can also simply search for research papers basis their topics and/or journals of interest and can then filter out the open access content from the results.
To filter open access articles from the search results, users must tap on ‘Access Type’ filter and select Open Access, then click on “Show Results” to get the most relevant results.
Notifications
Every week, we also collate the most relevant open access articles available for the user based on their preferred reading interests and send those to user’s mobile device. R Discovery uses machine intelligence to find open access research papers that our users will find valuable and notifies them promptly about these through personalized notifications.
References
- Trust in research. Research Survey by Elsevier and Sense About Science. June 2019. https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/908435/Trust_evidence_report_summary_Final.pdf
