Many research funding agencies promote broad access to funded research by mandating that articles describing the research should be publicly available. The Public Access section of a Google Scholar profile contains the articles that are expected to be publicly available based on funding agency mandates. For each article, you can view the applicable mandates and see if it is publicly available. If the article has a publicly available version, a link marked [PDF] or [HTML] appears on the right hand side.

An article can be publicly available from several sources including its publisher, an institutional repository, a research area specific repository and others. The Google Scholar indexing system tries to include all publicly accessible versions that follow our inclusion guidelines. For your own profile, you can update the list of articles and make corrections. You can also make an article publicly available by uploading a PDF of the article to your own Google Drive.

The Public Access Mandates table presents summary statistics about public access mandates for different funding agencies. For each funding agency, you can view the level of public availability of mandated articles overall and over several recent years.

How do you figure out which agency funded my research?

The Google Scholar indexing system automatically extracts funding information from the acknowledgement sections of articles. You can see the funding acknowledgement for an article by clicking on its title on the public access page.

When does the public access mandate take effect for my paper, and what is an "embargo"?

Public access mandates usually specify that funded articles should be publicly available within a given period of time (referred to as the "embargo") after publication. You can see the embargo period for an article by clicking on its title on the public access page.

I didn't write one of the articles listed on my public access page. How do I remove it?

Your profile should only include articles that you wrote. To remove an article that you didn't write, click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "I'm not an author of this article" from the list of options and click "DONE". The article will be removed from your public access page. It will also be deleted from your profile. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My article wasn't funded by the listed agency, how do I fix it?

Click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "This article wasn't funded by any of these agencies" from the list of options and click "DONE". The article will be removed from your public access page. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My article isn't really covered by the listed mandate because the publication date in my profile is incorrect, how do I change it?

Click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "This article's publication date is incorrect" from the list of options, enter the correct date and click "DONE". If the new publication date is outside the scope of the mandate, the article will be removed from your public access page. This will also update the publication date in your profile. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My coauthor was funded by the listed funding agency and not me, what should I do?

The simplest thing would be to ask your coauthor to make the article publicly available. Once the publicly available version is included in the Google Scholar index, your public access page will be automatically updated.

You can also indicate this on your public access page. To do this, click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "I'm not the responsible author" from the list of options, select the authors that are responsible for making the article publicly available and then click "DONE". The article will then be listed in the "Recused" section on your public access page. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile. Once the article is publicly available from another source, it will automatically move to the "Available" section.

Why is there a star (*) next to the "not available" count on my profile page?

The star indicates that one or more of your mandated articles is not yet publicly available and that you have recused yourself from making them available.

Why doesn't the Public Access section appear in my profile?

The Public Access section is only available for public profiles. If your profile is currently private, click the "Edit" button next to your name, check the "Make my profile public" box, and click "SAVE". If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

If your profile is already public and you still don't see the Public Access section, the Google Scholar indexing system has not yet identified any articles with public access mandates in your profile.

My paper is publicly available from its publisher. Why isn't it shown as publicly available on my profile?

The Google Scholar indexing system tries to include all publicly accessible versions that follow our inclusion guidelines. Please contact your publisher and ask them to make sure that the publicly available version is accessible to our search robots.

You can also make the article publicly available by uploading a PDF of the article to your own Google Drive. To do that, click the "UPLOAD PDF" button next to the article on your public access page. If you don't see the "UPLOAD PDF" button, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile. Please upload only articles that you've written and have the rights to share.

My paper is publicly available from a repository. Why isn't it shown as publicly available?

The Google Scholar indexing system tries to include all publicly accessible versions that follow our inclusion guidelines. Please contact the repository administrators and ask them to make sure that the article is accessible to our search robots.

You can also make the article publicly available by uploading a PDF of the article to your own Google Drive. To do that, click the "UPLOAD PDF" button next to the article on your public access page. If you don't see the "UPLOAD PDF" button, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile. Please upload only articles that you've written and have the rights to share.

If I upload an article to my Google Drive, will it be publicly available?

Yes, the uploaded article will be linked from your profile. It will also be eligible for inclusion in the Google Scholar index.

I accidentally uploaded the wrong article, how do I replace it?

Click on the title of the article, and then click "UPDATE PDF". Follow the prompts to upload a PDF file from your computer. The link in your profile will be updated immediately. If the original version was indexed in Google Scholar, it will be replaced in a few days.

Note, the original uploaded article will still be in the "Public research articles" folder in your Google Drive. If you wish, you can delete it from there as well. If you don't see the original article or the 'Public research articles' folder in your Google Drive, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

How do I delete an uploaded article?

Go to the "Public research articles" folder in your Google Drive, and delete the article from there. The link to the article will disappear from your profile and the Google Scholar index in a few days.

If you don't see the "Public research articles" folder or the article in question in your Google Drive, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My account administrator has disabled public sharing and I can't upload!

This error message means that your domain's administrators have disabled public sharing through Google Drive possibly as a part of organizational policy. Please contact your domain's administrators for assistance and clarification.

Public Access Reports for Agencies

In addition to reviewing public access for all your articles, you can also view and export public access reports for individual funding agencies. You can view an agency-specific report by clicking the agency’s name on the left-hand side of the Public Access page on desktops, or by selecting the agency in the dropdown list on the top-left side of the page on mobile phones.

Funding agencies can require articles to be available at a particular repository (e.g., PubMed Central), at a group of repositories (any subject or institutional repository), or anywhere on the web. Agency-specific reports take these requirements into account. When an article is available at a suitable location, it will be linked on the right. If you don’t see the link for an available article, you can provide the link to us. For agencies that specify a particular repository, there is also a link to submit your article to that repository. You can also fix errors - remove articles, correct publication dates, or update funding information.

What happens after I provide a link?

Our indexing system will attempt to fetch and index the article. It will then verify whether the link provides a free-to-read fulltext version of the article. If the indexing and verification are successful, the article will be marked available. If either indexing or verification fails, you will see a 'FIX LINK' button next to the title of the article.

I accidentally provided an incorrect link, how do I change it?

You can update a previously provided URL at any time by clicking on the "UPDATE LINK" button next to the title of the article, and providing a new URL. Providing a new URL will restart the indexing and verification process.

Verification failed with a "couldn't fetch the URL" error, what should I do?

All provided URLs are fetched by automated software known as “crawlers”. If you see an error stating that the indexing system couldn’t fetch a URL, please check if the URL is working and doesn’t result in errors such as an HTTP 404 (file not found) or HTTP 500 (server error). If the URL is working fine on your browser, please reach out to the administrators of the website to make sure that it is accessible to our crawlers. You can point them to the Scholar inclusion guidelines.

Verification failed with a message that there's no scholarly article at the URL I provided, now what?

Our indexing system uses automated software known as “parsers” to identify the bibliographic fields (e.g., title, authors, publication date) of a scholarly article. If it is unable to identify the appropriate fields at the URL you provided, it is unable to index the article. If you see such an error, it is possible that the website hosting the URL is not configured for Scholar indexing. We recommend asking the administrators of the website to update it to follow Scholar inclusion guidelines.

The system couldn't find the fulltext of the article at the URL I provided, how do I fix it?

The Scholar indexing system uses automated software to identify whether a given web page is the fulltext version of an article. If you see an error stating that the indexing system couldn’t find the fulltext, please check the URL to make sure it doesn’t go to an abstract page or a homepage. If the URL appears as fulltext to you, it is possible that a fulltext version is not available to our crawlers. We recommend asking the administrators of the website to update it to follow Scholar inclusion guidelines.

The system couldn't find the free-to-read fulltext at the URL I provided, what can I do?

Please check whether the URL allows all users, including off-campus users, to read the fulltext of the article without logging in or other authentication. If you believe that the URL leads to a publicly available version of the article, it is possible it doesn’t include a machine-readable indication of its public availability. We recommend reaching out to the administrators of the website to make sure that it includes such indicators for free-to-read articles (e.g., via a citation_fulltext_world_readable metatag).