Have you ever found an article that piques your interest but when you click on it, you get a paywall? It's tempting to pay a hefty sum to read something immediately, but you have option for free access!
There are several legal and free extensions to add to your web browser (primarily Google Chrome) to access free articles. Please take a look at the following:
Unpaywall is a Chrome extension that unlocks access to 30+ million scientific articles and makes science more accessible.
Bypass Paywall will bypass paywalls on 160+ news websites. The creator of this extension went through the most popular news outlets manually and wrote custom logic to bypass paywalls, or try
This blog post discusses some other great alternatives.
Google Scholar is an excellent online search engine of scholarly articles AND grey literature (i.e. scholarly sources that are not books or articles like conference proceedings and dissertations). I recently created a video on how to how to search DeTamble Library's holdings and Google Scholar simultaneously.
Last but by no means least, we offer interlibrary-loan (ILL) free of charge. Using this service, we can provide you with articles and books from other libraries FREE of charge. Normally once you request an article, you can have it delivered to you in 2-3 business days. ILL books may take up to three weeks, due to retrieval and shipping. Please see the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) page for more information.
If you have further questions or need help getting started, please reach out to me.
-Seth Allen, Library Director, DeTamble Library, St. Andrews University (allensw@sa.edu)
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