Q. What is a paywall and how can I avoid them?

Paywalls are a website/publisher wanting the reader/user to pay either a one-time fee (such as $30 for an article/paper download from a scholarly journal) or pay for a subscription in order to access its content (such as The New Yorker magazine site allowing you to read only so many articles before blocking access to others). Some might argue they are a type of embargo in some cases (such as when a paywalled article becomes viewable online once it ages out of relevancy).

In the research context, users typically encounter paywalls when not using the library resources.

Oftentimes, you can copy and paste the title of the article behind a paywall into the Discovery catalog to see if one of our databases grant access to the materials. If from the New York Times, we also offer a student pass to access on their site, though content from that publisher will still come up in our catalog and some databases.

If we do not have access, the catalog might prompt you to place an interlibrary loan request for the content, or you might find the content on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine via the url.

Be aware that there is sometimes online-only content from publishers which offer indexed content to libraries but the content itself can only be accessed on the publisher website (not in a database) in order to drive individual subscriptions. In other words, our databases might know about an article but can't grant access. Or, we might have online access to some of their articles that were published in print as well, but, because their other articles were published only online, they do not allow for them to be held in databases. Much like other born-digital content, our institution may not be able to get a license to such content and it may not be available via interlibrary loan (because no libraries can get a license to it), either. 

To learn more about paywalls, see the relevant tab in the box below: