What is free – what is not

When you are working in the campus area with a computer connected to the university network, you may search information with UEF-Primo or Google Scholar or a reference database. If you find an interesting article, you click it to read it and usually the article opens.

This might give an impression that most of the scientific information is free. Actually, this is not the case. The university library pays for subscription of the scientific journals. The access is based on the IP-addresses of the network.

A detail of the action menu of IEEE xplore database. On the right the text: Access provided by University of Eastern Finland.
Many databases are also acquired by the library.

Remote access allows access regardless the place

Fortunately, the access is possible also outside the university network. You are required to log-in in UEF Primo. After logging in, all the resources are available again. The right to use resources is valid as long as you have a university user account, regardless of the place and time.

Read more about logging in and remote access from library web pages.

Locate open access versions

An article originally published behind a paywall might be available openly on other place than the original publication.

It is possible to install an add-on in your computer’s browser that snoops on whether an article is available openly on some other web page. Add-ons include Unpaywall, Open Access Button as well as Google Scholar Button.

Read more about searching and tracking about open access publications from the UEF Library Guide for open publications searching.

To Do:

  1. Log in to UEF-Primo for getting access to all acquired materials by the university
  2. Try to locate open versions of the articles the university has no access.