How to Read SAGE Journal Articles for Free, Legally

SAGE publishes around a thousand journals, with a particular strength in the social sciences, education, psychology, nursing and health research. Most of the papers on SAGE Journals are paywalled, but SAGE has one of the more generous sharing policies of the large publishers, and that makes free copies easier to find than for most. Here are the legal routes.

1. Check for a free copy in a repository or on the author's site

For most SAGE subscription journals, authors may share the accepted manuscript as soon as the paper is accepted, with no embargo. They can post it on their own website, put it in their university's repository or a subject repository, and share it on academic networks. The accepted manuscript is the peer-reviewed text as the journal accepted it, before typesetting, so the content matches the published paper.

Because there is no waiting period, a SAGE paper can have a free copy from the day it appears. A small number of journals are exceptions to this policy, and the final published PDF may not be posted openly without SAGE's permission, but the accepted manuscript is usually enough. Paste the journals.sagepub.com link, the DOI or the title into the finder on our home page and it will check the open-access indexes for a copy.

2. Look for a preprint

SAGE's journals cover the fields where preprint servers have grown fastest. Sociology and political science papers appear on SocArXiv, psychology on PsyArXiv, and economics, law and management on SSRN. Health and nursing research is increasingly posted on medRxiv. A preprint is the version from before peer review, so it may differ from the final paper; our guide to preprints and published papers explains what to check. Note that a few SAGE journals do not accept papers that were posted as preprints, so for those titles no preprint will exist.

3. Check whether the paper is open access

SAGE publishes a number of fully open-access journals, where every article is free:

• SAGE Open, a broad journal across the social and behavioural sciences
• Open-access titles in medicine and health such as SAGE Open Medicine
• Society journals that have converted to an open-access model

It also publishes open-access papers in its subscription journals when the authors' funder or university has paid for it. Open-access articles carry a label on the article page, and the finder sends you straight to the publisher's PDF when a paper is one of them. Our guide to the kinds of open access explains the difference between an open journal and a single open paper.

4. Ask the author

Since SAGE authors are allowed to share the accepted manuscript immediately, an email to the author is more likely to succeed here than with most publishers; the author does not have to wait for an embargo or worry about the rules. Our guide has a template for writing to an author. The corresponding author's email address is usually printed on the first page of the article and on the publisher's page.

5. Use a library

SAGE's journals are part of the standard packages that university libraries buy, and the social science and education titles are core holdings for most. Go through your library's website or choose the institutional login on the article page. If you are not at a university, public libraries can often obtain a single article for you by inter-library loan, and some universities give alumni access to part of their collection. See our guide to getting papers through a library.

Free trials and sample issues

SAGE sometimes opens a journal's content free for a limited period, for example around a conference or an anniversary, and several journals offer a free sample issue. These are hit and miss, but if a search lands on an article page that opens without asking you to log in, it is worth saving a copy while you can.

If nothing turns up

With no embargo to wait out, the most common reason a SAGE paper has no free copy is simply that the author has not uploaded one. Asking is the obvious next step and usually works. Our guide to journal embargo periods explains why SAGE's policy is unusual, and the overview of legal ways to read papers for free covers everything else.