Paywalls & Publishers

Have you ever been doing research, or even reading the news, and come across a screen like this before?

If you haven't, this is what a paywall looks like. It blocks your access to content and lists the price of access to that content. The example above is for a scholarly journal article from a scholarly publisher, Taylor & Francis. Traditional scholarly publishers operate on a subscription model for their journals (much like newspapers and magazines) and a pay-to-download system for individual articles.

$15 might not seem like much, but imagine if you had to pay for every single article you cite in a paper - it adds up! In addition, prices can vary widely depending on the publisher and features of scholarly work, such as how recently it was published.

Let's Go Scholarly Article Shopping

Below is a sample bibliography on a science topic. Click the link to each article, and if needed, try to "get access" to it so you run into the paywall. Note the cost to download of the full content of each work and add them all together.

Note: Make sure you're not signed in to access through your university library, so you can see the full article price (using incognito mode can help with this). We'll talk about how libraries help you gain access to paywalled scholarly information in the next section.

Attributions

• Paywall image and shopping activity adapted from the Duke Library 101 Toolkit.