How to Read Wiley Articles for Free, Legally

Wiley Online Library carries more than a thousand journals, many of them published on behalf of learned societies, across the sciences, medicine, the social sciences and the humanities. Most of the research papers are paywalled, and a single article can cost more than the price of a textbook. Here are the legal ways to read them without a subscription.

1. Check for a free copy in a repository

Wiley allows authors of papers in its subscription journals to place the accepted manuscript in a university or funder repository after an embargo. The accepted manuscript is the peer-reviewed text as the journal accepted it, before copy-editing and typesetting, so the content matches the published paper.

The length of the wait depends on the field. For most science, technology, medicine and psychology journals it is 12 months from publication; for most social science and humanities journals it is 24 months. Individual journals and funder agreements can shorten this, so a paper may be free earlier than the standard period suggests.

In practice, a Wiley science paper more than a year old, or a humanities paper more than two years old, often has a free copy in a repository. Paste the onlinelibrary.wiley.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

Wiley lets authors post the submitted version of their paper on a preprint server at any time, before or after publication. In the life sciences that usually means bioRxiv or medRxiv, in the physical sciences arXiv, and in the social sciences SocArXiv, PsyArXiv or SSRN. A preprint is available immediately, so it is the route to try for a recent paper. Our guide to preprints and published papers explains how the versions can differ.

3. Check whether the paper is open access

Wiley publishes a large number of fully open-access journals, where every article is free to read:

• Advanced Science and the other open titles in the Advanced family
• The former Hindawi journals, which are now part of Wiley
• Society journals that have moved to an open-access model

It also publishes open-access papers in its subscription journals when the authors' funder has paid for it, and papers published under national agreements between Wiley and universities are often open access too. These papers carry an "Open access" 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 labels.

4. Ask for a read-only sharing link

Wiley gives authors a way to create a link to a full-text, read-only version of their article, which they can share with anyone. Subscribers can create similar links through Wiley's content sharing feature. The article opens in the browser without a download option, but it is free and entirely legitimate. Authors often post these links on social media or their own web pages, and most will send one if asked. Our guide has a template for writing to an author.

5. Use a library

Wiley's journals are part of the standard packages that university libraries buy, so if you are a student or member of staff, 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.

Abstracts, references and supporting information

Even for a paywalled paper, the abstract, the reference list and often the supporting information files are free on the article page. The supporting information sometimes contains the data tables or methods detail you actually need, so it is worth checking before chasing the full text.

If nothing turns up

For a recent paper with no preprint, the embargo on the repository copy is probably still running, and in the humanities it can run for two years. Our guide to journal embargo periods explains the timing. Asking the author for a copy or a sharing link is the fastest route in the meantime.