Some people have had problems accessing full-text articles from the links in email alerts. As I forward a lot of journal alerts, I recently sent out a general email to my departments to explain what to do if encountering this problem. Here is an amended version:

If people report difficulties linking to full-text articles from email alerts, the first thing to establish is whether they are trying to do so from off campus – usually that is causing the problem.

Trying to link remotely from an email alert to an article connects directly to the database or provider login page, thus bypassing the UC proxy server – so the provider doesn’t recognise the user as an authorised subscriber.

If the page includes links such as “purchase article”, “buy now”, “add to cart”, or “sign in”, then that’s not the right place to access the article via our UC subscription. The user should get out of there forthwith, go into the Library catalogue, and connect from the ejournal record to the same provider or database. To spell out the steps to follow:

1. Go into the Library catalogue.
2. Find the ejournal title.
3. Click the link (or the right link) in the Web access field of the catalogue record.
4. Enter username and password in the UC remote access login screen.
5. Select the same issue as in the email alert (presumably the latest).
6. Find the article of interest and follow the links to the full-text.
7. For the html version, there should be no problem opening the full-text directly. For the pdf version, the only option presented may be to save the file first.