Access at Kent State to refereed journals

There are at least three ways by which you can gain access to the refereed journals that you will need to read in this course, both for the assigned readings, and for your work on your own paper:

1. You can find some of these journals on the second floor of our library. Papers from past years are bound in large hard cover volumes. Issues from the current year are in a special area on the second floor. You can also avail yourself of the holdings of various other libraries that will honor your Kent State student ID, such as Akron.
2. You can request the loan of various articles directly from the librarians working in our Interlibrary Loan offices.
3. You can access much of what you will want to read and need to read in this course on line from the Kent State Libraries web site. Their site is www.library.kent.edu. There you will want to click on the link for Alphabetical List of Databases. From there select B and then go to Business
   source Premier and click either on On Campus or Off Campus as needed. On Campus works in the college computer lab. Call the Reference librarians to find out what password you need if you are going to work Off Campus. Printing can be tricky. In the college lab you will have to pay for copies printed where you need to print via the icon on the lower menu bar rather than via the print command under the File menu. Often the PDF texts will have to be printed this way in the lab. What works for you at home may be another matter. Also, you will probably lose the graphics of the article if you print via the Full Text option rather than PDF text. Finally, you will have to discover by trial and error what you can print and what you can’t at the moment, in terms of the fact that some journals are stricter at protecting their recent material than are others. You will see that in some instances the journal’s on line link ends up offering you the opportunity to pay for receiving a copy of the article. In these cases you will see that our library’s web site provides you with the alternative of getting the article through interlibrary loan. There will be a charge, but less than the journal itself wants to charge you.

The bottom line on this is that I am NOT requiring you in this course to use any article from a refereed journal that you cannot access for free on line. If you are desperately curious to get an article published this month in your hands, the library will help you, for a fee. If you are seriously going to consider submitting your paper to a real journal, you may find it worthwhile to pay for some articles. However, I will accept your work – and I expect the editorial boards to do the same – from issues that are a year or two old if those are the only ones you can get on line without paying. There is plenty of very good work you can do on that basis, and, after all, we are practicing here. Finally, some journals are much more generous than others about making their current or at least recent work available on line. I have given them my preference in the assigned readings.