When you are not signed in, UNI has no account to count against, so it counts against your internet address instead. Everyone sharing one connection therefore shares one allowance. A studio, a campus, a library or an office spends a single day's free reads between all of them, and whoever opens a journal last is the one who gets stopped.
That is why a colleague can be turned away on their first journal of the day. They are not being counted from zero. They are inheriting a count that other people on the same connection have already run up.
What is actually being counted
The number is how many different journals have been opened from your address since midnight UTC. Two things follow from that, and both surprise people:
- Reads by signed-in people on the network count too. The address is recorded against every visit, whoever made it, and the signed-out tally does not filter them out.
- Opening the same journal twice costs one read, not two. Different journals are counted, so going back to something you have already read is free.
Signing in is the fix
A signed-in account is counted on its own, against that account and nothing else, wherever you happen to be sitting. It is usually a larger allowance as well: signed-out visitors are served between one and five free journals a day, and signed-in non-members between one and ten. How many journals you can read for free explains where your own figure is shown on the page.
For a studio or a class that reads a lot, a membership removes the limit at every tier, and institutional access covers a whole department under one arrangement.
Things that will not help
- Moving to another wi-fi network. Most shared networks have the same problem, so you would be joining somebody else's count rather than starting your own.
- Switching to mobile data. Mobile networks routinely place many customers behind one address, so this often changes nothing.
- Private or incognito browsing. The count is not held in your browser. Clearing cookies or opening a private window makes no difference.
- Waiting a while. The count clears at midnight UTC and not before.
Why it works this way
Counting anonymous reading has to key on something, and an address is the only thing a signed-out browser reliably offers. The trade-off is that it is a property of the connection rather than of a person. Signing in replaces that guess with your actual account, which is why it is the answer to almost every version of this problem.