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Hi Lisa Online journals have been a boon for those with an Athens login (i.e. a UK university affiliation), but are no use to independent researchers. However, there are some ways round this: 1. Do just sufficient teaching or research at a local university so as to acquire honorary staff status (and that all important Athens login). 2. Order journal articles through your local library - should cost £1-£3. The BL charges much more for direct sales because it is passing on a copyright fee to the publisher. It doesn't have to charge this for supply of photocopies to libraries. 3. Use Google Scholar - quite good at finding freely accessible PDFs 4. Use Google's ordinary Advanced Search, searching on article title and file type=PDF If there's a freely available copy, it should come up. 5. email the author of the paper and ask for a PDF, after visiting their website to see if they automatically put everything online, e.g.: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/%7Etcrndfu/downloads.htm http://palaeoworks.anu.edu.au/publ2005.html As most archaeobotanical literature won't get online through publishers (being published in low circulation journals and monographs), we should perhaps be putting our work online ourselves. This is becoming standard practice in the sciences, e.g. for plant evolution: http://www.botany.utoronto.ca/ResearchLabs/BarrettLab/schb_pub.html http://www.eeob.iastate.edu/faculty/WendelJ/publications.htm http://www.agronomy.ucdavis.edu/mcluo/publication_list.htm Obviously work that is easier to access will be more cited. Mark On 30 Jan 2006, at 11:52, Lisa Gray wrote: > Dear all, > > Can any of you recommend the cheapset way I can view journal articles > online? > > I've just used British Library direct and it would cost me over £20 to > read the article I need and my alumni membership of UCL library > doesn't permit me to have remote access (and I won't get started on > the cost in money and time in rail travel to view the article > itself!). > > all the best, > > Lisa