Check for access to a web resource

If you find a journal article or other resource through a search engine, please be aware that we may not subscribe to it.

You probably already know that you can do a quick search for the article title in LibrarySearch or for the title of the journal itself in our Find e-journals page. But we also provide tools that allows you to customise your web browser so you can quickly check if you have access without going onto our webpages.

Google Scholar for Kent

You can customise Google Scholar to provide a link to any content you find that we subscribe to at the University.

In Google Scholar:

  1. Click on the ‘hamburger’ menu and click Settings
  2. Click Library links
  3. Search for University of Kent
  4. Tick boxes for ‘University of Kent – University of Kent’ and ‘University of Kent – Get full text via UoK’ and click Save.

This will save these settings to the browser on your computer you are using. Now when you search you will get links through to the content that we have access to from Google.

Kent Access Linker bookmarklet (Developed by the School of Computing at Kent.)

If you find an article or other resource on the internet, this will check if we subscribe to the resource and, if yes, give you access.

  1. Go to Kent Access Linker.
  2. Drag the link in the webpage to the bookmark bar on your browser.
  3. When you find an article or other e-resource on the internet, click the bookmarklet.
  4. If we subscribe to the resource, you’ll be asked to log in with your Kent IT Account details.

Open Access Button

When you find an article, you need on a publisher’s webpage or in a database, the Open Access Button searches the internet for an Open Access copy of the work. ‘Open Access’ refers to material that is free to all readers at the point of access.

Drag the button to the bookmark bar on your browser, except Chrome, where it’s a browser extension. The Open Access Button doesn’t work well with Internet Explorer/Edge.

More information on how to use the Open Access Button is available on our webpages.

Please also see our guide on finding open access versions of journal articles and books that we don’t have in our collections. Open Access refers to material that is free to all readers at the point of access, so you can use and share it easily.