"This content is available only to subscribers." "You have used your allotment of free articles this month." "Buy a day pass or subscribe to access this content." If you usually give up after you receive pop-ups like these on a news website, you might be missing out on alternative paths to accessing the full text of the stories you want through Duke's many subscription databases. While some sources do require pre-registration or a few additional steps to reach the same article, the access to the stories you want to read is often worth the extra effort.
First, be aware of the complimentary direct access that the Duke Law and Duke University community enjoys to several major news outlets:
- New York Times: Current members of the Duke Law community may join the Law School group account to receive complimentary access to NYTimes.com content on the web and selected smartphone apps. Student accounts will last until December of their graduation year; faculty and staff accounts require renewals annually. Register or renew an account while connected to a networked computer in the Law School building (such as the library workstations) or remotely while connected to the Law School's VPN (be sure to select the Library Resources option at sign-in, rather than Default). Then type "Duke" under "Find School" and select "Duke University School of Law."
- Financial Times: Current members of the Duke Law community may join the Duke Law Library "group subscription" by registering an account at the Duke Law site for FT.com using their Duke email address.
- Wall Street Journal: Through a partnership between the Fuqua School of Business's Ford Library and the Goodson Law Library, individual account access to WSJ.com is available to all current Duke University students, faculty, and staff who register with a duke.edu email address. Student accounts last for 90 days past graduation. To register, visit the Ford Library info page and follow the instructions.
Third-party databases also offer alternative full-text access to the content of many of your favorite news sites. To locate options for reading a particular newspaper or magazine, try a search of the Duke University Libraries E-Journals list or Duke University Libraries Catalog. For example, Raleigh's News & Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun both offer their current contents in the America's News database, making those locked website stories just a few extra clicks away. (Note that the options in America's News may include both HTML text versions of stories as well as images of the actual newspaper in PDF; for these examples, the E-journal search results dating from 2018-present provide the image-based access. You can view the options for a particular title in the database by clicking "See Related sources.")
Other popular sources that you can access via this E-journals search method include The New Yorker and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
For the Law School community, also keep in mind that Lexis and Westlaw offer additional access to various newspapers and websites. For example, Westlaw offers the recent stories from Business Insider, while Lexis features the full text of Inc.com. Because these databases are only available to the Law School community, results from these services do not appear on the campus-wide E-journals list search, but it can be worth searching separately to see if a desired source appears in the legal research services. (Note that an E-journals search result in Nexis Uni, the campus-wide version of Lexis, is a good indicator that it will be available in the Law School version of Lexis as well.)
For help with accessing the full text of other news resources when you hit a paywall, be sure to Ask a Librarian!