Shining a light on open access

Account

About Lantern

Lantern gives you a quick way to report on institutional, funder and government mandates, or fulfil your research goals.

We look for information about your articles in a whole range of places, like institutional and subject repositories and aggregators, grants databases, journal policy sources, bibliographic sources, and even direct from the publishers.

For each article you'll get:

  • The publisher's re-use licence
  • Is it in a repository (and which ones)?
  • Information from EuropePMC
  • Journal embargo and self-archiving policies
  • Grant and PI information
  • Some basic bibliographic data
  • and more ...

Learn all about it from our Full documentation

There are several ways you can use Lantern

By entering identifiers into our web form
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By Uploading a Spreadsheet
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Via our API
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How does it work?

Lantern takes a list of article identifiers (DOI, PMID and PMCID are supported), via a web form, a CSV upload, or through our API.

Each identifier is used to query multiple websites and data sources to locate information relevant to the item's Open Access status; for example, the re-use licence, whether it has been archived in an open repository, what embargo policies the journal has in place, etc.

Once all identifiers have been queried, the results can be retrieved via our website, as a CSV, or via the API.

Lantern aggregates data from a variety of sources:

Where What you get from it
CORE Core aggregates items from digital repositories all over the world, so here we can find out whether your items are archived somewhere.
CrossRef CrossRef is a canonical source of bibliographic data, provided directly by publishers, and holds key metadata and, in some cases, rights information.
Direct from the publisher's website Where information is not available in the usual databases, we go direct to the article on the publisher's website to extract as much information as possible.
DOAJ DOAJ is the premier registry of Pure OA journals in the world, so we can use it to learn about the journals in which your researchers are publishing.
Europe PMC EuropePMC aggregates open and closed access bibliographic metadata for the life-sciences, and holds full-texts for OA publications that we can mine for useful information, especially re-use licences.
Grist Grist, operated by EuropePMC, aggregates information about grants, P.I.s and publications associated with life-sciences funders.
Sherpa Romeo Sherpa Romeo is a key resource for information on journal embargo and self-archiving policies.

In addition to these, we are constantly looking for new sources that could enhance your results. We also monitor existing services for any new data they publish which we can take advantage of.

As Lantern is a labour-saving device which pulls information from a variety of sources, just remember that some of these sources assert re-use rights over the data we gather. We strive to only include sources with permissive terms, and you should check our sources documentation for more information.

Ok, so how do I get started?

Do you already have a Lantern account?
No! That's ok, you can still use Lantern without an account. You can enter single identifiers via our web form, and retrieve the results via our website. If you want more features, just sign-up. You'll get a load of other features for free
Yes! You can continue using the free features of Lantern! Take advantage of the ability to upload spreadsheets of multiple identifiers. If you have any special requests, such as support with very large backlog jobs, just contact us and we can help.
I don't know! No problem - just head on over to the front page and try it out. If you like it, sign-up to get more features. If you already have an account we'll log you back in to it, otherwise we'll make you a new one.

If you represent an organisation, and you want your own custom version of Lantern, we can arrange that for you. You can have it branded, appearing within your organisation's web domain, customised to gather specific data, and to automatically calculate compliance to your policies and any other relevant policies.

Read more about organisation accounts here

Want to know even more?

These other information pages will give you everything you wanted to know:
Case Study

See who else is using Lantern, and how it works for them.

Information for Organisations

Do you want your own organisational version of Lantern? Find out how.

Full Documentation

Get into the fine details of what you get from Lantern

Data Sources

Find out more about where we get our data from, and what you can do with it.

Terms and Conditions

All the legal stuff around using Lantern