Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Wiley Online Library

Access Issues for Wiley Journals (UPDATE: fixed)

UPDATE (27 February 2023) Access to journal issues from the past three years has been restored. If you encounter any further issues, please report them to [email protected]

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve got a support ticket in with Wiley to find out why a large number of the journals we should have access to on the Wiley platform won’t let us view full text (I’ve also contacted our Wiley sales rep). The problem seems to be limited to issues from 2020 to the present. As soon as I hear back from Wiley, I’ll post another update here.

Wiley Remote Access Problems Fixed

The problem reported last week about our inability to get remote access to Wiley content has now been resolved. Wiley explained the problem this way:

Due to an abnormally high amount of web activity on Wiley Online Library, Cloudflare, our security solution, put extra checks in place to identify and prevent any potential for malicious activity. These checks flagged EZproxy traffic as a potential threat, blocking all access via EZproxy, as well as other third-party solutions, linking directly to the PDF. We are working on whitelisting these providers to restore access, and have already done so with OCLC-hosted EZproxy traffic.

Continuing Problems with Off-Campus Access to Wiley Online Library (updated)

The problems that all Wiley customers using EZproxy for authentication were reporting yesterday are still lingering. Users from off campus have been seeing an error message from Wiley that reads “This web property is not accessible via this address” and looks like this:
Error message from Wiley

While we can now view and download PDFs from articles from off campus, if you try to download a book chapter, you’ll likely see this error message. This content should still be available though to users on the campus network.

As soon as Wiley sorts out this mess with their Cloudflare firewall, which as acting as though incoming traffic from EZproxy servers is part of a DDoS attack, I’ll post an update.

UPDATE: As of 11/2/2021, this problem is now fixed. See this blog post for details.

Watch Out for Journal Sites That Offer Articles in ReadCube Format

Some of the major journal publishers, such as Wiley and Nature, have added ReadCube as an option for viewing the full text of an article. Depending on which journal platform you’re on, you may see links for the article as a PDF and as an “Interactive PDF from ReadCube” or just one option. Here are some examples:

Nature--ReadCube option

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7221/full/456450a.html

Wiley--ReadCube

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1017/S1464793106007032/abstract

Although these “ReadCube PDFs” may be billed as PDFs, they have some flaws, as noted by researcher Ross Mounce, who finds that they are not clearly labeled on the article page by Wiley and that in some cases the images are messed up from the original PDF. In the case of Wiley’s interface, if you want the original PDF, you first have view the ReadCube PDF and then within the ReadCube interface look for the “Download PDF” option on the bottom; only then will you be able to the traditional PDF.

Interestingly, Mounce suggests that people who are concerned about the usability problems with how ReadCube is presented and functions, and with the DRM that is built into the technology, and with its possible privacy issues may actually want to block ReadCube PDFs from even appearing in their browsers and offers a range of browser plugins and security settings to do so.