So You’ve Hit a Research Paywall…

A research access guide for graduates, non-students, other academic expatriates.

scholastical.wordpress.com

So you’ve hit a paywall…

• Let us imagine that we are attempting to access the Full Text of an exciting paper about citizen science astronomy results…

• And let’s imagine it’s this paper… Robbins, Stuart J., et al. "The variability of crater identification among expert and community crater analysts." Icarus 234 (2014): 109-131.

But when we click on the article…

…we encounter a problem.

So how do we get the full text?

• In order to obtain Full Text access, there are a couple of approaches open to you.– Subscription access– Open access, Archive or other access

Subscription Full Text

• Academic or Community Library– Journal Access?– Interlibrary Loan? Check WorldCat for availability.– Check with a Reference Librarian

• Professional Memberships– Mostly trade publications and industry news, but might be helpful

if the article is published in your field.

• Employer Access– Use this professionally, ethically and judiciously if your employer

allows access to the journal you need. Do not abuse it.

• Wikipedia Resource Exchange– If you are using this resource to contribute to Wikipedia, you can

make a request at the Resource Exchange WikiProject.

Open Access, Archive or Other Full Text

• Open Access (OA)– “Gold” open access generally refers to OA journals (not typically if

you’ve encountered a paywall).– “Green” open access refers to the authors’ ability to self-archive,

generally involves more effort on part of author• Repositories

– Subject repositories (Cornell’s arXiv, ResearchGate, etc.)– Institutional repositories (hosted by author’s university or research

institution)• Google Scholar

– Search the bibliographic citation to determine if an archive copy is available.

• Contact Author– Request a copy of the paper– Better yet, if published in a green open access journal publisher (like

Elsevier), request that they archive the paper in a repository so everybody can access it.

So we are not without options.

In our example…Robbins, Stuart J., et al. "The variability of crater

identification among expert and community crater analysts." Icarus 234 (2014): 109-131.

• Paper is published by a green open access journal publisher.

• Authors have already self-archived using a subject repository.

• Full Text available.

arXiv:1404.1334 [astro-ph.EP]

When all else fails, document the request.

• Request the resource from your local library or research institution.

• Unfulfilled resource requests, as well as fulfilled ones, are documented and used in collection development decisions.

• Document the paywall’s impact on your research with the Open Access Button, a worldwide project to improve access to scholarly resources.– After documenting the impact, the OA Button

will automatically attempt to find the Full Text of your resource, as well as give you the opportunity to contact the author to request access.

openaccessbutton.org

Additional Information

• More information can be found at http://scholastical.wordpress.com.

• The example paper used in this presentation documents results from CosmoQuest’s MoonMappers project. They’re pretty cool, and enable average citizens like you and I to engage in science. You should check them out at http://cosmoquest.org.