How to Access Journal Articles Behind Paywalls

You found the paper you need… and then hit a paywall.

What many researchers don’t realise is that many paywalled journal articles are freely and legally available through several different routes. You just have to know where to look.

Here is a 7-step workflow to access journal articles for free, ordered to give you the highest chance of getting the paper you need. It starting with the quickest wins and working down to the slower fallbacks.

But before you start: copy the DOI from the abstract page — most of the steps below work from it, and having it upfront saves time.

Step 1: Check Your Institutional Subscriptions

Sounds obvious, but this should always be the first port of call. Universities, companies and research institutes pay substantial annual fees to maintain journal subscriptions so staff and students can access journal articles.

If you benefit from institutional subscriptions but are still hitting a paywall, the first thing to check is whether everything’s right on the IT side of things.

• Check your network connection. If you’re on-site, confirm you’re on the institution’s network, not a guest Wi-Fi that bypasses library access.
• If working remotely, connect via your institution’s VPN or library proxy before searching. Many researchers forget to do this before browsing PubMed. If you’re on the VPN but still seeing a paywall, go via your institution’s library portal rather than direct to the publisher site — some journal sites require a separate authentication step that the library portal handles automatically.
• For older papers (pre-2000s), try browsing directly through your university library portal rather than PubMed; older issues are sometimes catalogued under different database ranges.
• Check your alumni institutions too. Many universities offer alumni library access, sometimes free, sometimes for a small annual fee.

If that doesn’t work, go to step 2…

Step 2: Use Unpaywall

Unpaywall, a tool from the nonprofit Our Research, legally aggregates open-access versions of papers from university repositories, government databases, and publisher websites. Hit rates vary by field and publication year, but a meaningful proportion of papers — particularly recent ones — have a freely available legal version.

• Install the Unpaywall browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. It takes about 30 seconds.
• A small padlock icon will appear on journal article pages. Green means a free legal version exists; grey means it found nothing.
• Click the green icon to go directly to the open-access version. No DOI pasting, no additional steps.
• Dimensions and Scopus users: both platforms use Unpaywall data, so open-access versions surface automatically in your search results without the extension.

Other fast legal searches

• Google Scholar — search the paper title and look for a PDF link to the right of the result. Scholar surfaces links to OA versions, institutional repositories, and author-hosted copies automatically.
• CORE (core.ac.uk) — aggregates OA papers from institutional repositories worldwide. Catches content that Unpaywall occasionally misses, particularly papers deposited in repositories not indexed elsewhere.

No joy? Go to step 3…

Step 3: Check PubMed Central and Preprint Servers

PubMed Central (PMC)

PMC is a free archive of full-text biomedical literature maintained by the NCBI that is an often overlooked way to access journal articles. It holds millions of articles, many because NIH or other public funding mandates require full-text deposit. A paper may not appear freely available in a standard PubMed search while still being fully accessible via PMC. Search them separately at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc.

Preprint servers

A preprint is the author’s manuscript before or during peer review. In many cases, the preprint contains the same data and conclusions as the published version, though differences in wording, figures, or supplemental material can exist. For most day-to-day research reading purposes it is worth checking the preprint before assuming a paper is inaccessible. Search:

• bioRxiv (biorxiv.org) — life sciences, biology
• medRxiv (medrxiv.org) — clinical medicine, public health
• arXiv (arxiv.org) — physics, mathematics, computational and quantitative biology
• ChemRxiv (chemrxiv.org) — chemistry
• Author’s institutional or personal repository

One thing to check: confirm the preprint corresponds to the version you need. For citing purposes, note which version you accessed.

If you’re still drawing a blank…

Step 4: Email the Corresponding Author

Most researchers don’t do this to access journal articles because it feels awkward. But it isn’t. Authors want their work read. Cold email requests for papers are common and generally well-received.

• Find the corresponding author’s email on the abstract page (usually on the first page of the paper) or on their institutional lab webpage.
• Send a brief, polite request. One or two sentences is enough: name the paper, explain you’re a researcher who came across the abstract, and ask if they’re able to share a copy. Keep it short — authors respond to brevity, and long over-explained requests get ignored more often.
• If no response, check whether the author has a ResearchGate profile or lab website. Some publishers (including Springer Nature via SharedIt) allow authors to share links on personal pages, these are legal and often publicly findable. Be aware that not all full-text PDFs on ResearchGate have been shared in compliance with the author’s publisher agreement — if you need to cite the paper, obtain a copy directly from the author or through a verified open-access route rather than downloading from ResearchGate without checking.

What to know before asking:

• Ask what version they can share. Many journals allow authors to share the accepted manuscript (post-peer-review, pre-typesetting) but not the final published PDF. The accepted manuscript contains the peer-reviewed content, though it may lack final copyedits, figure corrections, or supplementary updates present in the published version — worth noting if you intend to cite it.
• The Share Your Paper site helps authors too. If you’re unsure whether an author is permitted to share their work, shareyourpaper.org lets you look up sharing permissions by journal. Authors sometimes don’t know what they’re allowed to do. If you’re on the other side of the equation — looking to share your own published work — see our guide on how to share your journal articles legally.

By now it’s looking less likely but there’s still hope. Try step 5.

Step 5: Use Your Science Society Membership

Many scientific societies publish their own journals and include full subscription access as part of membership. If you’re already a member — or considering joining for other reasons — check what journal access comes with it.

Examples (verify current membership terms on each society’s website):

• ASBMB: membership includes access to the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Journal of Lipid Research
• Biophysical Society: provides Biophysical Journal
• AAAS: includes Science family of journals

If you regularly read papers from one journal and also attend that society’s conferences, the combined value of membership often exceeds a single-article purchase price many times over.

If you’re still looking by now, a side step may be in order…

Step 6: Find an Open-Access Alternative

If you’re looking for a citation to support a specific fact or finding — rather than needing that exact paper for its methodology or data — it’s worth asking: is this finding published elsewhere in open-access form?

This works more often than you’d expect, because:

• Competing research groups often publish parallel results around the same time.
• Key findings are frequently reproduced by independent labs, often with the full text available.
• Review articles citing the original paper may cover the same finding clearly enough to support a background claim — though reviews are not a substitute for the original evidence if that is what your citation requires.
• Later papers from the same lab sometimes reanalyse the same data in an open-access publication.

This approach works best early in a writing project, when your bibliography isn’t yet fixed. If you’ve already committed to a specific citation in a submitted draft, you need the paper — move on to the next step, even though it takes longest of all.

Step 7: Investigate Library Options

Local or public libraries

Public library systems occasionally hold journal subscriptions, particularly for older print runs. In some cases access is only via microfilm or microfiche… limiting, but worth a quick call if nothing else is working. In the UK, the Access to Research scheme gives free walk-in access to a large collection of academic articles at participating public libraries — a substantial and underused route for researchers without current institutional affiliation.

Interlibrary loans

• Identify which library holds the journal issue you need. Your institution’s library staff can usually do this search for you.
• Submit an interlibrary loan request through your library’s online system.
• Allow 3–14 days. The loan may arrive as a scanned PDF or a physical copy. A nominal fee is common.

Important: if you need to access journal articles quickly (e.g. within 24–48 hours), interlibrary loans won’t reliably deliver in time. If you’re under deadline, use one of the faster steps above or go straight to the paid options below.

When You Have to Pay: Your Options

If none of the steps above yields the paper and you need it today, here’s what you’re looking at to access journal articles via paid routes. Prices below are indicative — check the publisher’s current rates before purchasing.

Single-article purchase

Prices vary by publisher and are subject to change — check the publisher’s site for current rates. Society member pricing is usually lower, so check before paying full rate.

ReadCube (Nature journals): 48-hour rental through to full PDF purchase

Rental tier is sufficient to access journal articles just to read the paper but you can’t print or import to a reference manager. For journal club use, you need the PDF.

Personal journal subscription

Only makes sense if you read that journal constantly. Check the publisher’s site for current subscription rates.

One thing worth checking before purchasing: whether you’re a member of a scientific society that publishes the journal. Society member pricing is often lower than the standard single-article rate — check the society’s website before paying full rate.

Next time you hit a paywall, don’t start by paying or giving up. Copy the DOI, work through the fast legal routes — institutional access, Unpaywall, PMC and preprints, author email — and only move to the slower or paid options when those fail. That sequence is the habit worth building.

For more on the legal side of sharing and accessing published work, see Common Myths of Copyright and Open Access: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. For managing what you find, head to the Bitesize Bio Managing the Scientific Literature Hub.

References

1. Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, et al. The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ. 2018;6:e4375. doi:10.7717/peerj.4375
2. Piwowar H, Priem J, Orr R. The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership. bioRxiv 795310; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/795310 [PREPRINT]
3. OurResearch. Unpaywall integrations. https://unpaywall.org/integrations
4. Jamali HR. Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles. Scientometrics. 2017;112(1):241–254. doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2291-4
5. ResearchGate. Copyright and ResearchGate. ResearchGate Help Center. Accessed Feb. 2025. https://help.researchgate.net/copyright/copyright-and-researchgate
6. National Center for Biotechnology Information. PubMed Central (PMC). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/about/intro/
7. American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Membership. https://www.asbmb.org/membership
8. Biophysical Society. Membership. https://www.biophysics.org/join
9. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Membership. https://www.aaas.org/membership
10. Springer Nature. SharedIt. https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/sharedit