Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Free Journal Articles?

The ways of publishing affect your searching.  All you want is to find a complete (full-text) article.  Your go-to search strategy is Google, the search engine...

Problem:  But wait one minute; that approach won't work.  Why??  Publishers are in business to make money; they are providing a service but not for FREE.  The academic journals with full-text articles that you need for your research project are only available for a price and are sold to academic libraries who are willing to pay big money for access.  Miami University Libraries negotiates electronic journal and eBook deals with publishers like Elsevier, Oxford, Sage, Wiley .  OhioLINK at the state level negotiates deals with publishers.  These prices go up yearly while library budgets flatten or decrease so maintaining access is a big deal.  Actual journal titles you may access change with changing rights and deals.

But wait, what about open access where everyone has free access to everything.  Not a reality, yet.  Yes, the publishing world is in transition and more content is available online free at various sites and using Google Scholar.   But NOT everything.  And often Google Scholar links back to Miami University Libraries' holdings for full-text access!

Solution:  To get the complete journal article, go to The Gardner-Harvey Library website.  Search one ore more library databases in Databases A-Z or use Articles & More (EBSCO Discovery Service), funded by Miami Libraries, to make access available to you.

Once you locate the journal articles you need, click the HTML or PDF full-text link which takes you magically to the complete article in that database or in another one via a "link resolver."  All you do is enter your Miami ID and Password, when prompted, in order to search the library database and get the full-text article. Yes, these electronic resources are password-protected when you are off-campus, because these electronic resources are not free, as you now know.  Google is no help at all here, sad but true.

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