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Free full text links

Two features of  FSTA Direct facilitate the discovery of and access to articles published in Open Access and other free full text journals and resources:

1. A filter on the Search results page enables you to limit the displayed results to records of articles from journals that offer free full text, and to records of patents held at the European Patent Office's esp@cenet web site
2. A full text link for free articles that uses Google Scholar to help locate the source article is used when the usual link, based on an article’s digital object identifier (DOI), is not available to us or is not used in the source publication.

The new filter is located in the ‘Filter your results’ panel, which is located on the right-hand side of the results screen.



The filter shows the number of records found in free full text sources (in this case 227), and clicking on the link ‘Show only results from OA and free full text sources’ will refresh the Results screen to show only these records.

You can revert to the full results set by deleting the filter - just click on ‘X’ by the filter message at the top of the results screen.

The new full text button is coloured orange and is one of three colour-coded variants displayed when full-text linking is enabled on your account.  The new button generates a search on Google Scholar using the first author’s name and the title of the article. In many cases, especially with recent articles published on sites such as HighWire Press or Biomed Central, the results at Google Scholar will be limited to just one or two records and it should be easy to identify and link to the correct source article.

There are some limitations to this approach:

• articles from trade and other journals may not be indexed in Google Scholar;
• some journal titles change over time and the link we present may be for an article in a superseded title that is not yet available online;
• some journals may have a policy that embargoes access to recent articles (the OA field in an FSTA record displays this policy and so may provide a guide to availability);
• some journals have a policy that limits free access to archive content and so older articles (e.g. prior to 1999) may not be available free of charge.

The reference article Full-text linking in FSTA Direct summarises all the full-text links used in FSTA Direct.

See also