Accessing Research

Have you tried to find up-to-date research about domestic violence but struggled to access research articles? You are not alone. Accessing research articles can be challenging, especially if you do not have a university log-in to help you access research behind a paywall like the one below. Luckily, there are many ways to access free research, even without a university affiliation. This page will introduce journal paywalls and list some ways to find open-access versions of articles.

Before we get into it, meet Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a very simple search engine for academic research. Just type in some key words that you are interested in and there will be a link to any free article PDFs that are available.

Why do Journals Try to Make you Pay for Research?

While academia is a partially publicly funded enterprise, academic publishing is a business.

When a piece of research is complete, the researchers will write it up into a paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed academic journal. This means that other researchers in a similar field will be asked to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper, to help the journal’s editor decide whether to publish it.

Researchers do not get paid for publishing papers – they are paid to do research and they are expected to publish, but they are not paid per article, nor do they receive money based on how much the article is read. Reviewers are also not paid – they review work on a voluntary basis, as a form of service to the field.

Journals, on the other hand, make a profit. Most articles are kept behind a paywall so that they can only be accessed from universities that have paid for a subscription to the journal. If an author doesn’t want their research to be paywalled, they must pay an “academic publishing charge” to the journal which is publishing their work. This charge is often thousands of pounds.

This is a controversial practice, prompting many researchers to support an open access movement to make all research publicly available. After all, the research itself is often publicly funded and researchers review manuscripts for free.

To find out more about the open access movement, visit PLOS

What is Open Access and how can you Find Open Access Sources?

Open access means that a research article is freely available to anyone. Usually, if an article is open access, you will see this symbol and be able to download a pdf of the paper. But what do you do if you want to read an article that is not open access?

There are a few options to try. First, you can try to find a “green open access” version of the article. “Green open access” means that a researcher publishes their article behind a paywall, but then they “self-archive” by putting another version of their manuscript online for free. This version of the article has the same material in it, it just hasn’t been ‘printed’ according to the journal’s style. Here are some ways you can find green open-access articles:

- Research Gate: Research Gate is a website that allows researchers to archive their articles. Some of these articles will simply have a download option, and others will prompt you to request the full text through their messaging system.

- Academia.edu: Like Research Gate, Academia.edu is a platform that allows authors to self-archive their work. You can often download articles from here. Some of these articles will simply have a download option, and others will prompt you to request the full text through their messaging system.

- Check the authors’ university pages: Even if you cannot get access to a full paper from the publisher, you should be able to see the authors’ names and institutions. With their name and university affiliation, it should be possible to find a webpage for any researcher. Sometimes researchers will self-archive their published work for free through their university profiles.

In the example below, the article is not available for free through the publisher, but it is accessible through the author’s researcher profile:

- Contact the author: If you have tried the above three options with no success, you can try emailing one of the authors. You should be able to find a researcher’s email address on their researcher profile (see above). All articles have a “corresponding author” who should be your first point of direct contact. You should be able to see which author is the corresponding author (and see their email address) on the publisher’s page. In the case below, the corresponding author is denoted by an envelope icon, and clicking on the icon reveals the email address. Most authors will be delighted that somebody wants to read their work and happy to share it with you.

If these options fail, you may want to try searching only for articles that are fully open-source (see below)

Open Access Databases

Probably the easiest way to get access to research for free is to simply search in open source only databases. Here is a list of good options to try: