The perfect paper for your studies is blocked behind a paywall?

Although the University Library has licenses for a huge range of publications, it can sometimes be that your literature search takes you to a publisher’s platform and you find a paper that you can only access after paying a fee, despite being connected to the campus network. In this case, it probably means that we do not have a license for this specific publication, but it’s not the end of the world! Here are three ways that you might be able to access the publication anyway:

Tip 1: Install the Unpaywall browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. Unpaywall searches through legal sources for versions of academic journal articles that are open access and therefore free of charge. An open access version will be indicated by a green open lock symbol on the right edge of your screen. Clicking on the symbol will redirect you to the relevant PDF.

Please note: sometimes preprint versions of papers are linked, which can differ not only visually but also in content from the final published versions.

Tip 2: Contact us with the the article and journal title, author details and publication year for the desired article. Through the interlibrary loan, we can provide a copy of almost any publication, even if we do not have it in our own library. Each document costs €1.50, which is still much cheaper than buying the article directly from the publisher.

Tip 3: Write to the author of the article and ask them to send you the article directly. You can often find the e-mail addresses of the “corresponding authors” on the publishing site, and authors are often glad to have their work read and used.