Anneliese Taylor
Anneliese is the Head of Scholarly Communication. Contact Anneliese for help evaluating journals and publishers, assessing research impact, and for scholarly publishing resources.

Quick Access to PDFs from Global Search

There’s a new full text feature when you search for articles, books and other resources using the global search box, which can be accessed from the Library’s home page:

UCSF Library single search box
Global search box at https://www.library.ucsf.edu

Shortcut to open access and freely available articles

A link to freely accessible, full text PDFs now appears below each free or open access journal article result, as in this example result from a search on COVID-19 and social grooming:

UCSF Library PDF through Summon
Screenshot of a journal article citation with a full-text PDF link

The PDF link leads you directly to the full text of articles that were published under an open access license on the publisher’s platform, or that have been made freely available on the publisher’s site or on PubMed Central. If you don’t see a PDF link, click on either the article title or ‘Full Text Online’ to be connected to full text through a UCSF subscription. Articles without online access through the Library can be requested for free from the UC-eLinks menu via the ‘Request It’ option.

About the PDF service

Unpaywall is the service behind the scenes that finds open and free publications. Unpaywall harvests free and legal open access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories and makes integration possible with other services. To find open versions of publications outside of the Library’s global search, try Unpaywall’s web browser extension tool. See a one-minute video on how the extension works.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash