As a warning this blog is only going to be useful to people at the University of Birmingham, although a similar method may work for people at other universities I don’t know the system so can not say for sure!
I am sure at some point everyone in the university wants to access a journal, on campus this is easy, you just search the internet, find the one you want, and it opens. No problems. Away from campus this can take more effort, you have to find the paper you want, and then access the eLibrary, find the journal, the volume, the page and the finally you get the paper. Well there is a much easier way!!
Search the internet like you normally would to find an article in any journal, but now instead of going to the eLibrary and having to find it you need to simply copy the following text into the web address of the page (after the .com but before the / there is an example below)
and refresh the page. If you are not already signed into my.bham then a login page will come up (in which you just enter your usual bham username and password) and then you will be redirected to the paper you are looking for! No searching through the eLibrary!
For an example we consider the paper entitled ‘On the structure of semi-invariant polynomials in Ore extensions’ from the Journal of Algebra (I just happened to be looking at this earlier today). This appears on ScienceDirect (click the link for the exact paper) but since I am off campus I can not access the pdf without buying it, or going through the eLibrary, none of which I can be bothered to do. So I simply copy and paste .ezproxye.bham.ac.uk into the address bar, the only important thing here is, is to put it in the right place! The address will be very long, as you can see in the example, but we don’t want it at the end, we want it near the start, specifically we edit it to read:
Obviously the ….. refers to the rest of the address. Then load the new page (simply hit ‘Enter’) and then you will be redirected to a login screen (which you need to use your Bham username and password for), or the page will simply reload with the option to download the pdf!
Hope you find this useful and speeds up the research process for you.