We all have those moments, having found 5 minutes where we can actually read that journal article our friend/colleague/supervisor/lecturer/mum sent us. We might be nestled in our nice comfy chair, laptop at the ready. Or we may be perched uncomfortably between the washing machine and fridge; the safest place to steal a few moments peace and quiet from the increasingly feral children running rampant through our homes.
And then it happens. That journal article, in the journal we know we could access at the click of a mouse when we were on campus, tells us we have to pay $38 to have 24 hours access. Why can’t it be easy? Why!!?
Whilst the scholarly landscape IS a minefield of paywalls, obscure journals, ‘quirky’ article titles and supplementary data, if you haven’t yet used our viaDurham tool, we promise you it can simplify many of the problems you may come across. Let us show you how:
viaDurham simplifies the login process off campus when you are on a journal’s web page, so that you don’t need to leave the page and find your way back from the Library website. It won’t work for everything, and won’t give you access to content we don’t subscribe to, but it will save you a huge amount of time (we hope) for a huge proportion of the over 20,000 journals we do have subscription access to.
Install viaDurham here!
Why don’t you give it a go, and let us know how it works for you?
If you’re still having problems, get in touch via our online AskDULib service (if you haven’t heard of this, Harri wrote a short piece for us introducing the service recently)
What about when it’s still behind a paywall?
For journal articles which aren’t covered by our subscriptions, we highlighted a selection of similar tools available to you which can help find open access versions of articles you want to read. This might provide you with everything you need, or it might help you weigh up whether to make that Document Delivery Request, contact the authors of the paper or suggest we subscribe to that journal (if we can – no promises!)
If you missed Ben’s post yesterday, we’ll be providing more online support and guidance in different forms in coming weeks and months. Ben noted we expect to, plan for and will learn from the mistakes we make along the way. In the spirit of owning those mistakes, the video below may be one of those…
RSS - Posts
Leave a Reply