Access Journal Articles Behind Paywalls for Free

Free Databases (all subjects): Free Online Journals

• BioMed Central. Free access to the highly rated journals published by BioMed Central.
• Directory of Open Access Journals. Free, full text journals, mostly in the sciences.
• eScholarship: University of California.
• HighWire Free Online Full-text Articles.
• IngentaConnect.
• PLoS.

How to Get Paid Journal Articles for Free

1. Step 1: Go to Google Scholar. If you’re a student, you probably have come across Google Scholar.
2. Step 2: Download free PDFs from Google Scholar. Most of the time there will already be quite a few PDF files on your first search.
3. Step 3: Sign up for an account on JSTOR.
4. 4 comments.

1. Check Your Institutions’ and Associations’ Subscriptions.
2. Investigate Other Library Options.
3. Get it From the Author.
4. Try Unpaywall.
5. Look for an Open-Access Alternative.
6. Purchase or Rent the Individual Paper.
7. Get a Personal Subscription.

The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research Databases

1. CORE. CORE is a multidisciplinary aggregator of open access research.
2. ScienceOpen.
3. Directory of Open Access Journals.
4. Education Resources Information Center.
5. arXiv e-Print Archive.
6. Social Science Research Network.
7. Public Library of Science.
8. OpenDOAR.

All articles in open access journals which are published by Elsevier have undergone peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download.

Publishing gold open access with Elsevier means that millions of researchers globally will be able to find and read your work, completely free.

The largest open-access publishers — BioMed Central and PLoS — charge $1,350–2,250 to publish peer-reviewed articles in many of their journals, although their most selective offerings charge $2,700–2,900.

Elsevier publishes subscription articles whose publication is funded by payments that are made by subscribing individuals or institutions. Subscription prices are set independent of open access articles and open access articles are not included when calculating subscription prices.

No regular standard journal charges nothing unless color printing of figures and reprints are opted. Many journals offer an option to keep the article open access which may cost around USD3000. Conversely, all open access journals charge a mandatory article processing fee in the range of USD500-3000.

How much does it cost to publish in a Springer journal? For the majority of Springer journals, publishing an article is free of charge. If a journal requires page charges, you will find them on the journal’s springer.com homepage or in its Instructions for Authors.

Elsevier publishes open access articles which are free for readers to access. We also make articles openly available through our open archives and open manuscripts via the CHORUS service.

Sci-Hub has been described as “the Pirate Bay of science”, but often receives praise for opening access to research. Police are warning students and universities not to access Sci-Hub, an “illegal website” that allows users to download scientific research papers normally locked behind expensive subscriptions.

Find Free Versions

1. Check for a free version of your chosen paper through the Open Access Button, available through that website or as a browser extension.
2. Search for your paper through PubMed, which includes health and medicine related papers.
3. Search with Google Scholar.
4. Try a regular web search.

Depending on what browser you use, you can usually bypass most sites’ paywalls by simply switching over to its “private” or “incognito” mode, whatever it’s called on your particular browser. However, some websites are more creative nowadays. They’ll notice your little trick and restrict you from viewing their contents.

The Unpaywall extension requires Chrome or Firefox. The Unpaywall extension requires a desktop browser. 204,896 users on Chrome and Firefox. “Must-have for anyone who wants to access the research literature.”

Using a VPN to bypass newspaper paywalls VPN gives you a virtual proxy address which helps you to bypass newspaper sites as they can’t track your IP address and you could connect and disconnect your VPN many times so that after every connection you get another IP address.

You can install the app from the market: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/anti-paywall. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/anti-paywall/likpiciaabojkjnaigjfhgdfokcahooc.

In Chrome/Edge go to the extensions page ( chrome://extensions or edge://extensions ). Enable Developer Mode. Drag the bypass-paywalls-chrome-master folder anywhere on the page to import it (do not delete the folder afterwards).