9 LibraryGatewayHack
Oliver Kennedy edited this page 2023-07-21 09:57:32 -04:00

Accessing ACM/IEEE/Springer/etc... articles from off-campus.

In spite of strides towards open access, many conference and journal publications are locked behind a paywall. UB has subscriptions to many of these, so if you're on a campus network, you're good to go.

You have a few options.

  • There may be publicly released versions of the document. Try searching Google Scholar or MSR Academic Search.
  • You can connect to the campus network through VPN
  • You can also connect to the specific publisher's website through the UB library gateway proxy. Take the server name part of the URL (e.g., the www.acm.org part of http://www.acm.org/long/path/to/paper) and add .gate.lib.buffalo.edu to it (e.g., http://www.acm.org.gate.lib.buff/long/path/to/paper). You can find a boookmarklet and JS code to do this below.

Bookmarklet

javascript:window.location=(function(u){var v=u.split('://');var w=v[1].split('/');return v[0]+'://'+w[0].split('.').join('-')+'.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/'+w.slice(1).join('/');})(document.URL)

Firefox Setup

  1. Right click in your browser's bookmark's bar.
  2. Pick "Add Bookmark"
  3. Name the bookmark what you like.
  4. Copy the above javascript blob into the URL field.
  5. Hit Save