An Easter Egg for Our Read­ers

by the STC team

Here's an Easter Egg for you! No, not of the tempt­ing, choco­late-loaden va­ri­ety (which wouldn't be en­joyable in a vir­tual ver­sion any­way ) but of that sort com­puter-ad­dicts know as "... an in­ten­tional in­side joke, a hid­den mes­sage, or a se­cret fea­ture of an in­ter­ac­tive work (of­ten, a com­puter pro­gram), ...". It's ac­tu­ally not a joke but a use­ful lit­tle fea­ture you may use while read­ing about the small things here.

Spores of Plu­teus cerv­i­nus (Ba­sid­iomycetes); 1,000x mag­ni­fi­ca­tion. CC BY-SA 3.0 Alan Rocke­fel­ler

You are used to the way we re­fer to pub­lished sci­en­tific pa­­pers in our posts by link­ing, most of­ten, to the PubMed en­try (here is an ex­am­ple from one of our re­cent posts ). We do this by pur­pose be­cause...

• We think it's im­por­tant that you, the read­ers, can scru­ti­nize our work by check­ing the orig­i­nal li­te­ra­ture. We do our best not to spice-up our sto­ries (pun in­tended ) but you don't have to be­lieve us. We're open to crit­i­cism and op­pos­ing opin­ions, and we want to help you to criti­size by giv­ing you our sources. Be­cause sci­ence.
• PubMed links have a longer half-life than most in­ter­net links, so we don't have to up­date the links in our older posts all too of­ten.
• More im­por­tantly for you, PubMed shows the Ab­stract / Sum­mary of a pa­per, if avail­able. So those of you who haven't ac­cess to a sub­scrip­tion to the re­spec­tive jour­nal can at least learn what the pa­per is about.
• Also, since some time PubMed shows links to freely-avail­able ver­sions of the ar­ti­cles (ei­ther di­rectly from the pub­lisher of from PMC; here's an ex­am­ple from an ear­lier post ).

Get­ting ac­cess to free ar­ti­cles has now be­come a lot eas­ier still, more 'user-friendly', as was ex­plain­ed these days in Na­ture  when in­tro­duc­ing the ap­plet 'Un­pay­wall' (nomen est omen ).

Un­pay­wall is a (free ) add-on for your browser, for desk­top and mo­bile (Fire­fox and Chrome ), no mat­ter whether you use Win­dows, An­droid, iOS, or OSX. Once in­stalled, it shows you a tiny 'lock' icon on the right side of you browser win­dow in­di­cat­ing by a color scheme whether a free PDF ver­sion of the pa­per is avail­able (green, gold, or blue = avail­able; gray = not avail­able). Click the 'lock' icon and the PDF opens au­to­mat­i­cally, ready for down­load. That's all, you're done.

One of us, Christoph, has tested Un­pay­wall dur­ing the last days ex­ten­sively and it seems to work re­ally well. We would like to note, in ad­di­tion, that Un­pay­wall – un­like the widely used and much ac­claimed Sci-Hub – ex­clu­sively ac­cesses legally open ac­cess con­tent, that is, within copy­right law. The Un­pay­wall app was de­vel­oped by the non-profit com­pany im­pact­story, which is sup­ported by the Na­tional Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF) an d the Al­fred P. Sloan Foun­da­tion, both trust­wor­thy or­ga­ni­za­tions in our view.

If you should en­counter prob­lems with us­ing Un­pay­wall, please feel free to men­tion this in an email to us. We'll try to help you as good as we can...