How to Read IEEE Papers for Free, Legally

IEEE publishes a large share of the world's research in electrical engineering, electronics and computer science, through its journals and the proceedings of its many conferences. They are hosted on a site called IEEE Xplore, where most papers need a subscription. Engineering and computing are also the fields where authors share their own copies most freely, so the chances of finding one are good.

1. Look for the author's own copy

IEEE allows its authors to post the accepted version of a paper on their personal website, on their employer's site or university repository, and on the preprint servers arXiv and TechRxiv. The accepted version has the same reviewed content as the published paper, without IEEE's final formatting.

Paste the paper's DOI or its title into the finder on our home page. IEEE DOIs begin with 10.1109. An IEEE Xplore link on its own does not contain the DOI, so use the DOI shown on the paper's page, or simply the title.

2. Search arXiv

In machine learning, computer vision, signal processing and robotics, most papers are on arXiv, often months before the conference. Our guide explains what arXiv is and how to use it.

3. Check the conference's own archive

Some conferences that IEEE co-sponsors publish free versions of their papers themselves. The best known is the Computer Vision Foundation, which hosts open-access versions of papers from the CVPR and ICCV conferences. If the paper is from a conference, search for the conference name with the words "open access".

4. Look for open-access articles on IEEE Xplore

IEEE publishes fully open-access journals, of which IEEE Access is the largest, and many of its other journals contain individual open-access articles. These are labelled on IEEE Xplore and can be downloaded by anyone.

5. Check the author's page and Google Scholar

Engineering and computing researchers commonly list their publications on a personal or lab web page with a PDF beside each one. Google Scholar indexes those pages. Our guide shows how to find free PDFs on Google Scholar.

6. Use a library or ask the author

Universities with engineering or computing departments nearly always subscribe to IEEE Xplore, so go through the library website if you belong to one. Otherwise, email the author. Our guide to getting papers through a library covers options for people outside universities.

Standards are a separate matter

IEEE also publishes technical standards, such as the 802.11 family behind Wi-Fi. Standards are mostly sold as documents and are not research papers, so the routes above do not apply to them. A university or company library is the usual way to read one.