Get me that PDF: How to access and read the research you need

By Jessica Lipowski

SAGE’s mission is building bridges to knowledge – supporting the development of ideas through the research process. We continually aim to disseminate high-quality, impactful research with robust methodology, and we want to ensure researchers can easily find and access our content.

Increasingly, research papers are published outside the paywall, with the number of Open Access (OA) articles published across the industry growing annually. Authors have the option to publish their article under a Creative Commons (CC) license in a traditional subscription journal (hybrid OA) or in a Gold OA Journal, where all content is published under a CC license (gold OA). In fact, in 2020, the number of outputs in Open Access channels surpassed those in subscription channels for the first time ever, according to Dimensions.

While Open Access is growing, a large amount of published content is published in subscription journals. Articles in subscription journals are typically available with access through an institutional or individual subscription to the journal. Here are a few tips to access the research you need in an ethical way when you encounter paywalls.

• Identify which articles you have access to. The SAGE Journals website offers you the ability to filter content you have access to, whether that access is granted via your institution, organization, or society to which you belong. The results will also include content that is free to read, perhaps via a CC license. When you are on the SAGE Journals website, click “Advanced Search”. At the bottom of the search landing page, you’ll see the ability to select “Only content to which I have full access”: https://journals.sagepub.com/search/advanced

• Sounds obvious, but double check that your library does not have access. When researchers discover content outside the library portal and library search engine, they often encounter difficulty using the right credentials. For example, you might find an article on Google Scholar. When you try to use your institution’s credentials there, it may say that your library does not have access. But sometimes your library does have access; it is just they have subscribed via a third-party aggregator like OVID, EBSCO and JSTOR. Publishers like SAGE also partner with Google Casa to help streamline off-campus library access. We recommend browser plug-ins like Lean Library (a SAGE Publishing Company), that have all this behind-the-scenes detail and can serve up the PDF immediately.

• You might also ask your librarian if they can arrange an interlibrary loan (ILL) with another library that does have access to the article. Libraries sometimes have arrangements in place to facilitate ILLs.

• Know someone who has access to the content? If the content is in a SAGE Journal, ask your contact with authorized access to use the “Share” button feature on the SAGE Journals platform. SAGE offers the “Share” option on articles to help provide an easy and ethical option for non-subscribers to access articles. The link sent to you through the “Share” function will provide you with a 30- or 90-days free access (depending on the journal) to an EPUB format of the journal article. Each link can be used an unlimited number of times during the validity period.

• See if the author is on social media. Often authors will publicize their work and share free-to-access copies, as they want their research to be read and cited. Search social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to see if the author has a public profile, so you can get in touch and interact.

• Look for OA articles. Publishing OA under a Creative Commons license allows authors to retain copyright of their work while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work. Look for articles with a CC license as they will be free to read and download.

• Search PubMed Central. Check to see if the article you are interested in is available on PubMed Central (PMC). PMC indexes the full-text version of the article. Some journals are fully indexed with PubMed Central, feeding all journal content through to the website. Other journals allow authors to deposit certain-funded manuscripts, for instance NIH funded manuscripts, to PMC. This mostly applies to content from journals in the STM fields.

• Browse repositories. Check your institutional repository or another relevant repository in your field. Many authors can upload the accepted version of their manuscript to these types of repositories, per institution or funder requirements or at the author’s discretion. If you are the author of a paper accepted to a SAGE-published journal, you may upload the original (before peer review) or accepted version of your manuscript to your institutional repository. SAGE was an early supporter of Green OA. Green OA refers to the archiving of the final accepted version of the author’s manuscript, with all peer reviewers’ comments addressed and revisions made, but before it has been typeset during the production process. SAGE is one of only two major journal publishers that allow authors to post the accepted version of their article with no embargo. Preprint servers like Advance also allow you to post your paper. Preprint servers, however, are the original version of the article and are not peer reviewed.

• Pay for access: Majority of publishers allow you to pay a one-time fee to download the article in question, also known as PPV. The fee is nominal, and options range from purchasing the access for a limited time or permanently. Explore whether your institution can provide funding or refunds for PPV.

It is worth noting that institutions will provide access to the journals to which it subscribes. When you search via a library’s catalog or directly on a publisher’s website, you will see the content to which you have access. Authentication occurs in a variety of ways, for instance via IP address or OpenAthens/Shibboleth. Your institution may have you login to a secure page on their website and then you will be redirected to the publisher’s journal page via a referral URL. Some publisher sites further allow users to connect their personal accounts to their institution’s holdings for an extended period of time, for example 2 or 3 months, thereby improving their patron’s remote access options—users simply have to pair their account while signed into the publisher site and authenticated by their institution.

If you are a member of an association that owns or is affiliated with a particular journal, that society may provide access to the journal as a benefit of membership. If the society to which you belong does not offer that journal as a potential benefit of membership and it is relevant to association members, you could always request that the society reach out to SAGE to determine pricing and provide access to its members.

As always, we wish you the best in your research journey and are here to support you in any way we can!

About the Author