Helsingin yliopisto
Negotiations between the FinELib consortium and Taylor & Francis hit a wall. Think Open blog tested Alternative Access tools to reach open versions of the articles published in journals behind the paywall. This is the abstract of the original post (in Finnish).
The negotiations with Taylor & Francis are terminated and consequently their journals are now mostly behind a paywall. However, there are some alternative ways to reach open versions of the articles published in T & F-journals. These include post-print versions in repositories and hybrid articles which are published open through paying an article prosessing charge (APC). These open versions can be traced with various databases and browser extensions.
Think Open blog tested these alternative ways, trying to find open versions of Taylor & Francis-articles (see a list of alternative access-tools). We found out that these tools produce substantial results and they can be used in different ways, according to field of science and according to one’s needs.
Summary
If you have a good picture of what you are looking for, Unpaywall browser extension shows you clearly which articles are open when you go to that article. If you are looking for open material on some certain topic, we recommend starting from the databases Base or Core, which are good general databases; the former including 60% open material and the latter 100%.
Google Scholar is good especially in Humanities and Social sciences, providing both open and paywalled material. For natural sciences and medicine we recommed browser extension Kopernio. Use advanced search or just combine the topic and publisher in simple search (here the following search phrase is used: ”advantages of social media AND Taylor and Francis”).
Of course you can always ask the author for a copy of the article either through email or through browser extension OA-button. If you know the title of the paper or its identifier (DOI), you can search for open version from thousands of repositories with this service .
If you have questions on using these alternative ways, support is provided in e-library@helsinki.fi.
Note also that help is on the way! Helsinki University Library will soon provide Get It Now service where you can get T & F-articles (with certain limitations). Remember also that the library offers an interlibrary loan service which be employed if you have some certain article in mind.
Markku Roinila
Information Specialist, Helsinki University Library
ORCID: 0000-0002-2456-2740