Access to fulltext of journal articles falls under a number of general categories:

1. 1.Some articles are not available electronically at all, e.g. some older articles. When you try to access the fulltext of these articles, you will likely be taken to the PubMed page that shows the abstract
   

2. 2.Some journals offer fulltext of all articles for free to anyone. This is typically called Open Access. The PLoS journals are an example of this. You should be able to get fulltext access to these articles without having to activate the EZProxy setting
   

3. 3.Other journals only offer fulltext of articles if you have a subscription to the journal
   

1. a.If you have a personal subscription to a journal, then you don’t need to use the EZProxy setting. You should be taken to the journal’s website that hosts the article. Typically the journal site will then ask you to enter your username/password corresponding to your subscription. After doing so you should be taken to the fulltext of the article
   

2. b.If you are a member of an institution that has an institutional subscription to a journal (e.g. if you are a student or staff member at a university), then you have three potential ways of getting fulltext access to articles that your institution subscribes to:
   

1. i.connect your Mac or your iPhone / iPod Touch to your institution’s local network (e.g. using WiFi). In this case you will have an IP address on your institution’s domain, and when you are taken to the journal’s site that hosts the fulltext article, the journal site should recognize you as coming from an institution with a subscription... and you should get fulltext without having to enter a username/password, and without having to use the EZProxy setting
   

2. ii.if you are off your institution’s local network (e.g. if you are connected to the internet using 3G or EDGE on your iPhone, or if you are at Starbucks on your Mac) then when are taken to the journal’s site that hosts the fulltext article, you will not be recognized as coming from your institution. Some institutions, but by no means all institutions, use a third party system called EZProxy to enable off-site users to connect to the institution and have their web browsing session go through the institution’s Proxy ... in this way you will appear to the journal site hosting the article that you have an IP address local to your institution. If your institution uses EZProxy, then you need to contact your librarian to find out what the appropriate EZProxy URL is to enter into the Settings panel.
   

3. click here for help with EZProzy URLs
   

3. iii.Some institutions do not use EZProxy but instead use a VPN (virtual private network) to enable off-network access to institutional resources. The idea here is that your network settings on your Mac or iPhone / iPod Touch are set up so that you connect to the internet through your institution... and thus essentially masquerade as having an IP address local to your institution. Contact your institution’s IT department to find out if they use a VPN and if so, how to set up your network settings to use a VPN

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