How to Read Nature Articles for Free, Legally

Nature is one of the most cited scientific journals in the world, and most of its research papers sit behind a paywall. The same publisher, Springer Nature, runs dozens of sister titles such as Nature Medicine and Nature Physics. Here are the legal ways to read their papers without a subscription.

1. Check for a free copy in a repository

Authors of papers in Nature's subscription journals are allowed to put the accepted manuscript in their university's repository, in a funder's archive such as PubMed Central, or on their own website, for release six months after publication. The accepted manuscript has the same peer-reviewed text as the published paper without the journal's layout.

This means a Nature paper more than six months old very often has a free copy somewhere. Paste the nature.com link, the DOI or the title into the finder on our home page and it will look for one.

2. Look for a preprint

Nature's journals encourage authors to post preprints, and in physics, computer science and biology most do, on arXiv or bioRxiv. The preprint is available from the day it is posted, so this route also works for papers published last week. The finder lists preprints alongside other copies, and our guide to preprints and published papers explains what may differ.

3. Check whether the journal is open access

Several of the publisher's biggest journals are fully open access, which means every article is free:

• Nature Communications
• Scientific Reports
• The BMC journals

Individual papers in Nature itself can also be open access when the authors' funder has paid for it. These are labelled "Open access" on the article page.

4. Ask for a free read-only link

Springer Nature runs a scheme called SharedIt. Authors and subscribers can generate a link that lets anyone read the full article in the browser. The link does not allow downloading or printing, but it is free and legitimate. Authors often share these links on social media, and you can ask an author for one. Our guide has a template for writing to an author.

5. Use a library

University libraries almost always subscribe to Nature. Go through your library's website, or choose the institutional login on the article page. If you are not at a university, see our guide to getting papers through a library.

News, comment and research are different things

Not everything on nature.com is a research paper. News stories and some comment pieces are free or allow a few free reads with registration. The peer-reviewed research papers are the part that is normally paywalled, and they are what the routes above are for.

If nothing turns up

For a paper less than six months old with no preprint, the embargo is probably still running. Journal embargo periods explains the timing. Asking the author is the fastest route in the meantime.