No library can keep up with the volume of materials being published today. Whether or not the USU Library unbundles its journal packages in the near future, some articles will not be available via journal subscriptions. Faculty and students are advised to learn more about the ways they can access non-subscribed materials ethically, some of which are summarized here.
Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery
The USU Library offers two resource-sharing services that can supply electronic copies of articles from journal to which the Library does not maintain an online subscription. Both are accessed via the same form for the ILLiad system and can also be reached from the ArticleLinker landing page.
- Interlibrary LoanWhen a patron places a request for articles to which the Library does not have local access, ILLiad routes the interlibrary loan request to a library that does have the article and receives a PDF version to deliver to the patron. The request generally is completed within 1-2 days unless the article is not readily available elsewhere. (Note that copyright law does not allow libraries to provide substantial portions of a single journal issue.)
- Document DeliveryWhen a patron places a request for an article which the Library owns only in print format, Library staff scan the print article and deliver a PDF copy to the patron via ILLiad.
Databases for Finding and Accessing Free Versions
- Google Scholar
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The academic version of Google’s web crawler retrieves freely available scholarly and semi-scholarly sources from all over the Web, including institutional repositories such as USU’s Digital Commons as well as government, nonprofit, and university websites.
- Microsoft AcademicAs a competitor to Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic has the same purpose, but its unique features sometimes return different results.
Browser Extensions to Access Free Versions
- Lean LibraryThis USU subscription is the best way to find an available copy of an item, either through and Open Access repository or interlibrary loan. It is available on all major desktop browsers and will actively notify you of access to content you find on the web.
- UnpaywallA product of the nonprofit Impactstory, Unpaywall is available for Chrome and Firefox. It matches the content of a journal site or database record against a repository of free, legal versions of published articles.
- Open Access ButtonFunded and supported by various scholarly groups, the OA Button searches a repository of free-legal versions of published articles and, if none is available, facilitates placing a request to the author to add a legal version to that repository. The OA Button is implemented as a bookmarklet, which users save to their browser’s bookmarks bar for use on a journal or database site.
- EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio)Now owned by Clarivate Analytics, which also owns Web of Science, EndNote Click is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that finds a free version of a published article when clicked from a page about the article.
Questions? Contact your department liaison
Contact your liaison librarian with any questions about unbundling. Search for your department on our Subject Liaison List to find your librarian and their contact information.
