We do not subscribe to the content you want?

Bangor University Library and Archives Service understand how frustrating it is when you cannot access the content you need to read. 

We aim to provide access to content that meets your research and teaching needs; every year we conduct a robust journals review in consultation with academic staff, library reps, college managers and deans to recommend cancellations (based on cost and usage data) and make requests for new resources.

In light of rising journal costs, it is increasingly important that researchers are aware of other avenues to obtaining full text content.

If the Library does not have the item you require, and it is essential to your research or study, we aim to obtain it as an inter-library request.  Please note the service is subsidised by the Library and Archives Service. For further details, please see here: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/library/using/docdel.php.en

Alternative sources of full text content include:

• Google Scholar provides links to full text where it is available freely online, they harvest from authors personal webpages and University repositories, but often the links take you to the publisher’s webpage requiring payment to access. 
• PubMed also has a LinkOut option for articles, which includes free versions available in institutional repositories.
• OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories which allows you to search across repository contents http://www.opendoar.org/search.php
• ScienceOpen works as an aggregator bringing together open access content from across a wide range of publishers and platforms including PubMed Central, arXiv and SciELO.  ScienceOpen also includes citation and usage data and encourages post-publication peer review of articles to eliminate bias. https://www.scienceopen.com/

Please also check out these new tools that might help you get free, legal access to pay-walled articles:

• Open Access Button – is a free, open source tool that can be used online via the website or as a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. At the Open Access Button website https://openaccessbutton.org/ enter an article URL, DOI, PMID ID, Title or Citation. If the article is available, you will be provided a link to where it can be accessed. Alternatively, if you have downloaded the extension for Chrome or Firefox, just visit the article page on the journal’s website and click the OA button in your browser, which will show its availability.  You might also be interested to read about a new JISC project that is exploring a new service, which would embed Open Access Button functionality in the discovery/interlibrary loan workflow.  This project aims to: prevent multiple interlibrary loan requests for the same article; improve the user experience of the interlibrary loan process; contribute to making more articles open access; offer cost and time efficiency by checking if requested material is already available under open access conditions. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/supporting-inter-library-loans-with-the-open-access-button
• Unpaywall - is a newly launched browser extension developed by Impactstory. The browser extension can be downloaded for Chrome and Firefox and allows you to find free, full text versions of articles, where they exist. Once installed in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, Unpaywall brings up a green or grey tab on the side of the screen.  A green ‘unlock’ sign means that a free version of the paper is available and a grey ‘lock’ icon means that the tool could not locate a free version. http://unpaywall.org/

Further reading:

• https://goldsmithslibraryblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/open-access-button-and-unpaywall/
• http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/04/04/announcing-unpaywall-unlocking-openaccess-versions-of-paywalled-research-articles-as-you-browse/?platform=hootsuite
• http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-Browser-Extension-Could/239714
• https://www.nature.com/news/unpaywall-finds-free-versions-of-paywalled-papers-1.21765

Problems accessing the full text of a journal article?

The most common cause of problems off-campus is following an external link or going directly to a publisher’s webpage.  You can access all of the Library's electronic books, journals and databases from computers off-campus, but the resource provider needs to know that you are a Bangor University member.  If you have arrived at the publisher’s webpage, look for an option to sign in via Institutional Sign In, Shibboleth, or UK Access Federation and then select Bangor University from the list. Please note that if you are browsing the publishers’ sites, they will also present content that is not included in our subscription.

The best way to ensure you get the full text content off-campus is to find the article or the journal in Library Search and follow the link to the full text content.  By default, Library Search will display only items for which there is full text access. (You can tick the box “Also show results without Full Text access” if you require). If you are off-campus, clicking on the link from the “View Online” box will prompt you for your Bangor University username and password before taking you to the full text. Some journals are available to us from a number of different providers, so you will see a number of options with different date ranges; ensure you choose the right link.

 

If you are searching on a bibliographic database such as Web of Science or ProQuest, you will need to follow the full text links to access the full text, we do not subscribe to all the content you will find in a bibliographic database. 

If you are searching on Google Scholar, we have enabled many of the full text links for our subscribed content; on campus, you will see the “full text at Bangor” links.  To enable this on your own computer off-campus, go to the Google Scholar homepage, select “library links”, then search for, and select Bangor University.  We have not enabled all content links, so it is wise to always double check Library Search for content; also, you never know we might also have it in print.

If you think we should have access to an article but it is not working, please contact us (details below) with full details of the article (author, title, journal, issue/volume, year, page numbers) so we can investigate for you.  All publisher websites look and behave slightly differently and our library links can get broken, please contact us any time you are stuck.

For further help, please contact the Academic Support team on libsupport@bangor.ac.uk