How to Access Academic Journals (Legal Full Text)

1. Library copy

Open the article from the library catalog, a database "Full Text" / "Find It" button, or a Google Scholar library link such as FindIt@Harvard. Sign in with campus credentials if you are off campus.

2. Legal open copy

Install the Unpaywall extension or paste the DOI into the Simple Query Tool. In biomedicine, also search PubMed Central and Europe PMC. For NSF-funded papers, search NSF-PAR. Prefer the publishedVersion when more than one legal copy exists.

3. Interlibrary loan

Request the article through your library's ILL / document-delivery form. Include the DOI. Delivery time is local policy, not a universal 2–7 days.

4. Author copy

Email the corresponding author and ask for the author accepted manuscript. That request is ordinary scholarly practice. Uploading the publisher PDF to a social network is not the same thing.

It looks like the link you followed uses EZproxy and is no longer valid. Harvard Library has migrated its authentication from EZproxy to OpenAthens.

This error page will display until December 31, 2026.

Note that certain browser extensions, such as Zotero or Lean Library, may automatically add this proxy information to links.

• Harvard's fix is to convert the old bookmark with the library's EZproxy link transformer, or to search the title in HOLLIS. Other campuses do the same job with a new proxy host or an OpenAthens redirector.
• Re-open the item from your catalog. Do not keep a dead ezproxy…/login?url= link in a reading list.
• If Zotero or Lean Library still prepends the retired proxy host, turn that auto-proxy setting off in the extension, then open the catalog permalink again.

• Publisher site first. ScienceDirect or Wiley shows a paywall because the browser never passed through the library. Search the title in the library catalog or click Institutional login.
• Dead proxy bookmark. An old ezproxy…/login?url= link fails after the library switches to OpenAthens or a new proxy host. Re-open the item from the catalog.
• Guest or alumni account. Walk-in and alumni privileges are narrower than a current student login. Ask the library what remains after graduation; do not assume summer or alumni access.
• PDF viewer, not the PDF. Some platforms stream a reader that vanishes when the session ends. Use the download / "Save PDF" control and keep the DOI with the file.

click a library link, e.g., "FindIt@Harvard", to the right of the search result;

click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;

click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;

click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.

Online access to library subscriptions is usually restricted to patrons of that library. You may need to login with your library password, use a campus computer, or configure your browser to use a library proxy. Please visit your library's website or ask a local librarian for assistance.

Off-campus access links let you take your library subscriptions with you when you are at home or traveling.

The recorded subscription information expires after 30 days and is automatically deleted.

You can disable off-campus access links on the Scholar settings page.

If the 30-day record has expired, or you never searched Scholar from campus, use the library catalog, the VPN, or Institutional login. Do not treat a vanished [PDF] label as proof the library dropped the journal.

Yes! We harvest content from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves.

Unpaywall finds the kind of articles you'd see in peer-reviewed scholarly journals like Science or PLOS One, plus pre-publication versions of similar work from preprint repositories like arXiv. Specifically, it looks for articles with a kind of identifier called a DOI.

Of the roughly 322 million works in OpenAlex, about 121 million (37%) are Open Access by this definition.

Host kind: publisher-hosted beats repository-hosted.

Version: publishedVersion beats acceptedVersion, which beats submittedVersion.

Direct PDF link: a location with a pdf_url beats one without.

Match quality (repository locations): a repository record matched to the work by DOI beats one matched by title.

Repository rankings: some major repositories, like PubMed Central and arXiv, rank above others.

Sites requiring registration. ResearchGate, a well-known academic social network, requires login before reading. OpenAlex already excludes it to stay on the right side of publishing agreements, but the registration wall would be a deal-breaker on its own.

Sites gated by CAPTCHAs. These make it hard for automated systems to verify that full text is really there, and make the links less useful — you never know whether a request will return the article or a puzzle. SSRN hosts many articles OpenAlex would love to include, but it prompts for CAPTCHAs and accounts after a few downloads.

A green Unpaywall miss on a paper you saw on ResearchGate is expected. Email the author for the accepted manuscript, or go to ILL. Do not treat the social-network PDF as a licensed open copy.

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Publisher PDF

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

PMC record

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

2022 correction

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004085

DOI resolver

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Title

Attention Is All You Need

arXiv id

1706.03762

First version (Atom published)

2017-06-12T17:57:34Z

abs URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

PDF URL

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

PMC makes all content free to read (in some cases, following an embargo period), as NLM believes that the best way to ensure the accessibility and viability of digital material over time is through consistent and active use of the archive. However, free access does not mean that there is no copyright protection (see the PMC Copyright Notice).

The 2024 NIH Public Access Policy requires Author Accepted Manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, on or after July 1, 2025, to be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, for public availability without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication.

Europe PMC provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources. It's available to anyone, anywhere for free.

When the full text is not available, Europe PMC can provide extended access to full text, with links to legal free copies via Unpaywall.

NSF maintains a publicly available repository of peer-reviewed publications: the NSF Public Access Repository.

NSF awardees must deposit all peer-reviewed publications and juried conference papers into the NSF Public Access Repository from awards resulting from proposals submitted, or due, on or after January 25, 2016.

Final versions of manuscripts accepted for publication after peer-review in either scholarly journals or juried conference papers or workshop proceedings (collectively referred to as author's accepted manuscripts or AAMs) must be deposited in NSF's Public Access Repository (PAR) at or before the time of publication.

Removing the 12-month publication embargo from all Portable Document Format (PDF) product types.

NIH uses the journal's acceptance date (1 July 2025). NSF uses the award date (22 January 2026). A 2024 NSF award can still sit behind a twelve-month wait. Search NSF-PAR anyway — the accepted manuscript may already be public.

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

nothing in this clause prevents a library or archives from participating in interlibrary arrangements that do not have, as their purpose or effect, that the library or archives receiving such copies or phonorecords for distribution does so in such aggregate quantities as to substitute for a subscription to or purchase of such work.

We conclude that the CONTU Guidelines are outdated and should no longer be relied on as an appropriate measure of when ILL borrowing exceeds the statutory exemption in 17 U.S.C. § 108(g)(2).

The CONTU Guidelines are not, and never have been, enacted into law.

A borrowing library may receive copies of up to five articles from a single periodical title each year without paying any copyright fees. For each copy beyond that, a license fee (or a subscription) is required. This rule applies only to articles published within five years prior to the date of the ILL request. This is known as the "rule of five" or "suggestion of five."

• Article title, authors, journal, year, volume, issue, and pages if you have them.
• The DOI. A complete 10.… identifier is the fastest lookup. See how to find a DOI.
• A PMID or PMCID for biomedical papers, when PubMed shows one. A PAR ID for NSF-funded papers, when NSF-PAR shows one.
• The date you need it — a real deadline, not a guess. Rush service, if it exists, is a local option and may carry a fee.
• Do not request an article you can already open through the catalog, Unpaywall, PMC, Europe PMC, or NSF-PAR. Staff will check, and you lose a day.

Subject: Request for accepted manuscript — [article title]

Dear Dr. [family name], I am a student at [institution] working on [one-sentence topic]. I cannot access "[article title]" ([journal], [year]; DOI: [10.…]) through my library. If you are allowed to share the author accepted manuscript, I would be grateful for a copy for private study. Thank you for your time, [your name].

Policy records contain information on how articles can be made open access for the published, accepted and submitted versions of an article.

The LibKey Nomad browser extension connects researchers who start on the open web at websites like PubMed, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT to Open Access and library-subscribed full text

• Legal open copy first. Unpaywall, PMC, Europe PMC, NSF-PAR, and a subject repository such as arXiv do not ask for campus credentials.
• Public or state library. Many public libraries license a smaller journal set and run their own ILL. Bring a card, not a publisher invoice.
• Walk-in access. Some university libraries let visitors use licensed databases on a building PC. Hours and ID rules are local; call before you travel.
• Author accepted manuscript. The email template above still works when you are not enrolled anywhere.
• Do not buy the PDF on the first screen. Check the four paths on this page before you spend personal money on a file a public library can request.

Systematic downloading of batches of articles from the main PMC web site, in any way, is prohibited because of copyright restrictions.

Users of PMC are directly and solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions defined by the copyright holder.

• "Access denied" / "Purchase this article." You are on the publisher site without institutional login. Open the same DOI from the library catalog, connect the VPN or OpenAthens session, or use Unpaywall.
• Library link missing on Scholar. Settings allow five libraries and live in a cookie. Set them again after you clear cookies. Resolver access still requires you to be a current patron.
• Scholar [PDF] vanished off campus. The 30-day off-campus record expired, or you never searched from campus. Use the catalog or VPN; do not assume the subscription is gone.
• Unpaywall tab never appears. The article may have no DOI, or no legal OA copy Unpaywall indexes. ResearchGate and many SSRN files are deliberate misses. That is a real gap, not a broken extension. Go to ILL or email the author.
• PMC record is an abstract or an embargo page. Wait for the release date shown on the record, or request ILL / the accepted manuscript. Europe PMC may still surface an Unpaywall copy.
• NSF paper, empty PMC. Search NSF-PAR. NIH and NSF do not share a deposit cabinet.
• VPN connected, database blank. Disable the ad blocker on the library domain, allow the popup the resolver uses, and check the library status page before you assume the journal is unsubscribed.
• Zotero or Lean Library prepends a dead proxy. Harvard's retirement page names both extensions. Turn the auto-proxy setting off, then open the catalog permalink.