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Faculty Guide

Guide to effectively using library resources and services at HIU.

Looking for Articles and Hitting a Paywall

Often, when searching for articles, you hit a "paywall". Paywalls are requests for payment for an article because it was not published in an Open Access environment or is only available through a paid subscription. Many times there are "pre-publication" versions in an author's institutional repository (the publisher allows the author to post an early version of the paper to drive up interest in the full published version), use those when possible.

Here are a list of databases that host / index many articles, but some are behind paywalls:

When You Hit The Paywall

If you have searched our "Alumni / Free / Open Access" databases and still cannot find a free version of an article you want / need, then try one of these two options. They attempt to do the same thing, but are from different groups. They have scoured institutional repositories (University and College repositories of faculty research) and have indexed versions of papers. If you have the browser extensions on they will automatically try to match it with a freely available version. In some cases, they will provide, not the published version, but a "pre-publication" version of an article. Journal publishers will sometimes allow faculty to store / make available an early version of a paper that they will publish. In most cases, they are nearly identical. If you use a pre-publication version, and it is known, be sure to cite it as such.

If you have found an article in Google Scholar, out in the open web, or even in one of our databases, but it isn't available, try OpenAccessButton. This website (also a Google Chrome extension) has thousands of articles available as Open Access (you can read it without paying).

After you have added the extension to the Chrome browser, if it comes across a DOI to an article, it will automatically try to match it to a freely available version of the same article.

 

You now have two additional options provided by LibKey (a Third Iron company).

  • Just search our catalog for articles. We now have LibKey as part of our catalog. When an article is available from an Open Access source, it will automatically be available. Just look for the "View PDF" button in the search results.