How to ask a professor to send you their work

One of the pieces of advice we tell each other a lot in para-academic spaces online is 'ask the author and they will send you a pdf of their journal article'. This idea has been popularised in tweets that I see recirculated maybe as often as every month. And of course there's the ongoing critique of the for-profit academic publishing industry. So, I thought it might helpful to share some advice to help people successfully make these kinds of requests.

I have heard from some academics that when they receive email requests from strangers, they feel unsure how to respond. For example, this is an email a colleague in the UK (not me!) recently received:

HI: I am kindly requesting from you a paper copy of your publication: ['Title...']

best regards

[Name, personal postal address]

The first misstep here is the informal opening - you should always use 'Dear Professor Surname' or 'Dear Dr Surname'.

The professor who got this email thought it was particularly strange that the request was specifically for a 'paper copy', and that the sender included their home address, expecting it to be sent there. Don't ask for this - it won't happen! The best you can expect is a pdf attached to the reply email.

It's worth mentioning, too, that you should make sure you search thoroughly to see whether the article you are looking for has already been shared open access. Some publishers allow authors to freely share a pre-publication version of their article, often a minimally-formatted word processing document that hasn't been typeset, so it probably won't have page numbers. Check Academia.edu and other similar sites and university websites for prepubs.

If you do send an email to a professor requesting they send you their publication, I think it's going to help if you you tell them who you are and (very briefly) why you are asking for the paper.

In this case, you could write something like this:

Dear Professor [Their Name],

I am a student [in Country Name/at Institution Name] and I am interested in reading your article ['Title of Article'] for my dissertation about [topic]. Unfortunately my [university/college/school/library] does not provide access to [Journal X/Database X], so I am writing to ask if you could kindly share the pdf with me?

Thanks in advance,

[Your Name]

Please feel free to copy/paste and edit this email if you want to use it.

If you're a postgraduate student, you could also mention (again, briefly!) the project you're working on - if the author is in your field and interested in your work, you might develop a working relationship with them (yes it's unlikely, but still worth making the effort just in case).

So in brief the process should look something like this:

1. Google the author (make sure you spell their name correctly)
2. Do they have a personal profile on any of the following sites?
1. Academia.edu
2. ResearchGate
3. Humanities Commons
4. Kudos
5. LinkedIn
3. Check each of those: academics often post pdfs of their articles and book chapters in these places, and if so they should be free to access.
4. Check the author's institutional homepage. If they have a profile on their university's website, there might be links to their publications in an 'institutional repository' (for example; https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/)
5. If the piece is nowhere to be found in these locations, then you can email the author.
6. Use "Dear Professor Surname" or "Dear Dr Surname" (or if they don't have a PhD, use "Ms "or "Mr" - but, as always, be careful not to misgender anyone)
7. Write a brief email - they don't need your life story - but it may increase your chances of success if you tell them why you would like access to their work.
8. Sign off politely (e.g. "sincerely" or "best wishes")
9. Wait patiently for a reply.

Good luck!