One of the big barriers to doing academic work when you’re not a salaried academic is lack of access to academic literature. Books are one problem, though you can often get hold of them through inter-library loans, national libraries, or (if they’re not too new) cheap second-hand copies online. But academic journals are the major difficulty.
People outside academia often don’t realise that even salaried academics won’t have access to everything. University libraries have budgets and have to decide which journals to subscribe to. Even professors sometimes need to use the techniques in this post. But those of us outside academia need to use them all the time. So, for those who don’t yet know, here are my top ten methods for getting hold of academic literature.
- Use openly accessible literature. Much of this can be found online. You may find relevant ‘grey’ (non-academic) literature through conventional search engines: anything from commercial research reports to zines. But for journal articles, I’d recommend starting with the Directory of Open Access Journals. This independent directory includes over 2 million articles in over 10,000 open access journals, more than half of which are searchable at article level, and more are being added all the time. The journals cover most topics and must be subject to peer review or editorial quality control.
- Look for conventionally published articles that are openly accessible. Publishers such as Sage, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Emerald, Wiley, and Springer are quietly making more and more content open access. Follow them on Twitter for the latest news. Sometimes a publisher will open its electronic doors completely for a limited period of time, which gives you a chance to get in and harvest pdfs to your heart’s content. More often they will offer a selection of openly accessible articles which you can find by digging around in their websites. And some have initiatives such as SpringerOpen which encompasses a range of fully open access journals in science, technology, and mathematics.
- When you search using Google Scholar, look beneath each search result for the small print that says ‘all X versions’ (X being a number). Click on that link and sometimes you will find that one or more of the versions includes a pdf you can download. This may be a pre-print or draft article, but it will be close enough to the final paper for you to assess whether you want to cite it.
- Academic social media sites, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, act as repositories for pre-prints and other openly accessible formats of articles which are uploaded by their authors. Anyone can sign up to these sites and they can be a useful way of keeping track, particularly of new literature by people whose work you respect.
- Google Books is a project for scanning and digitizing books. If a book is out of copyright, or the author has given consent, you can search and see full pages. Otherwise you can search and see small sections of text around the search string; sometimes this can be enough for your purposes.
- Amazon lets you ‘look inside’ some books, and again you can search and see parts of the text around the search string. Amazon is also handy for tracking down citation details as you can always look at the copyright page of any book with the ‘look inside’ feature.
- For much fuller access to academic literature, you could consider securing an affiliation with a university department. Universities can offer honorary titles such as Associate Fellow or Visiting Fellow. These don’t come with a salary attached, but they do come with benefits including access to electronic and hard copy literature, seminars, collaborations, and perhaps some mentoring. Also, it looks good on your CV. You might be asked to do some teaching or other academic work in return. If you know of a department where there are people in your field, you could ask whether they would take you on as an associate.
- Another option is to ask people you know in universities to get pdfs for you. If you’re going to do this, make sure first that the university concerned has access to the journal from which you want articles; you should be able to do this via the journal’s website, or the university library’s website, or both. It’s probably best not to ask people too often, though, as that can get annoying.
- Twitter is also a great place for sourcing articles. You can either put out a general tweet, perhaps with the ubiquitous ‘pls RT’ at the end, or you can use a hashtag such as #ICanHazPDF which will put your tweet in front of a wider audience. Do include the link for the article you want, and use a link shortener such as bitly to make more space in your tweet.
- If all else fails, email the corresponding author and ask for a copy of the article. Keep your email short, and polite, but try to say something about why you want the article and what you’ll be using it for. Authors are usually pleased if someone shows an interest in their work and will be happy to email an article to you.
However, there is a big question, for me, about the extent to which all this is ethical. And there are certainly some very unethical ways of accessing academic information, such as downloading pirated e-books – though I do realise that, in some countries, people have few or no alternatives. So next week I’ll say more about the ethics of academic publishing.
Helen Kara 
Helen, Thank you. An excellent post. This is really useful and helpful.
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Thank you so much. I am still enjoying the services of my university library but am already aware of the difficuly I will face finding access to quality literature post PhD.
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Great post! Here are a few more:
– PubMed Central. This is an online repository for the biomedical and life sciences. It claims to host over 3.7 million articles (and growing, thanks to OA mandates). The list of journals hosted is here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/
– Institutional repositories for the authors. These will often show up in Google Scholar anyway. Find the affiliation for an author on the resource you want, and then check if their institution/s has/have a repository. Some repositories require you to click a link and provide an email – as I understand this might be the case if there is still a publisher embargo on the article. You may get a pre-print or “as accepted” copy of the document, without the pretty publisher formatting/typesetting.
– Professional associations. Some associations maintain their own professional / technical libraries. Two examples I know of are IEEE and Engineers Australia. They can sometimes get copies of academic works through inter-library loans.
– Workplace library. Some employers – public and private – have either their own libraries or access arrangements to another library. E.g. The state public health services in Australia give all staff access to medical / health libraries while they’re employed with the service. My husband’s employer (a large multi-national tech company based in the USA) has it’s own “university” / online professional development site. They can access technical & professional literature and make requests for other resources. (Obviously this doesn’t help you if you’re self employed!)
– Local public library. It’s a long shot, but I’ve read anecdotes of people accessing academic material through public libraries (usually through inter-library loans). I’ve never done it but it might be worth a shot!
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That’s hugely helpful, Emma; thank you. I also found out only today, from Twitter, that in the UK there is now a scheme to provide access to academic research through public libraries. Not all libraries have signed up, but it appears many have. Info here http://www.accesstoresearch.org.uk/libraries – I don’t know whether there are equivalents in other countries.
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Ooh, this is really useful. Just the other day I was trying to access some interesting-looking academic papers about women in IT. The official price ws something like £20 a pop, which was just prohibitively expensive. (Although, are they missing a trick? If it was more like music, say 60p or something, i probably would have coughed up).
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Sorry, I missed this somehow! Though they’re not missing much I don’t think. ‘They’ are hugely profitable academic publishers who make lots of money from bulk subscriptions paid by university libraries. Their pricing model is created to ensure those subscriptions keep coming in: tens of pounds for a single article, thousands to subscribe to a single journal, small tens of thousands to subscribe to hundreds of journals. So for institutions it’s economy of scale, and individuals don’t matter. Sigh…
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I find it strange that you open your article by stating that academic books are easy to get through interlibrary loans, but articles are not. That is simply not the case – for those associated with university librarians and those who are NOT associated with university libraries. Members of universities CAN get academic articles through their university library via interlibrary loans. Member of the general public can get copies of academic articles through their public library using the same interlibrary loan service. I have worked in both public libraries and academic libraries – both providing interlibrary loans services.
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Abby, thanks for your comment and helpful clarification. To clarify further: I haven’t said that articles are not available through interlibrary loans; I said they’re harder to get hold of than books, as that has been my experience and that of many colleagues in academia. When I asked at my own public library during my postgraduate studies, I was told they were unable to provide access to academic journal articles (though it’s a very small library in a rural market town so the staff may not have known about the options). I know articles are available through academic interlibrary loans, but that only works if you have access to an academic library, and my post is written for those without such access. Articles are, of course, available online these days via public national libraries – but paywalled articles still incur costs, which are often prohibitive, particularly for those with low incomes.
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Great and matter of fact advice to the freelancers.
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Thank you Anbu.
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In Delaware, I can get a community borrowing library card for the University of Delaware library – I can take out books, and access academic databases onsite (from which I can download articles and some electronic books to a flash drive). So one additional suggestion is to check with your state universities, local universities or alma maters to see what might be available to you.
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Hi Helen – to make things easier, researchers can link their National and/or State Libraries to Google Scholar (menu > settings > library links) to get an indication of what research literature is available from these library databases. Some limitations: 1. If you don’t have cookies you will need to do this every time you log into GS. 2. It won’t mark everything they have and 3. will provide some false leads. But, it will give an idea of what is available on your topic for free from these institutions, and let you know whether it is worth exploring their collections further.
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Hi Rowena, thanks, that’s really helpful.
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