When you are not signed in, UNI has no account to count against, so your free reads are counted against your browser. A small first-party cookie is set on your first visit and the count is kept against that, so two people on the same office or campus connection each get their own allowance.
There is a second limit on top of it. A single internet address may read five times one person's allowance in the same period. Journals are one free read a day when you are signed out, so one address gets five a day between everybody using it.
What that means in practice
- In a studio of four people, all four read their article. Nobody is turned away because a colleague got there first.
- On a busy shared connection, once the address has spent its five reads for the day, everybody on it waits until midnight UTC, whatever their own count says.
- Your own allowance is still one. The address cap does not give you five reads, it gives the address five.
If your browser does not keep cookies
Then there is nothing to identify your browser, and the count falls back to the address, as it worked before 21 August 2026. On a shared connection that means sharing one allowance again. Private and incognito windows behave the same way: they start without the cookie, so the first read is counted against the address.
Clearing cookies starts your own count over. It does not clear the address's count, so on a busy connection you can still be held at the door.
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 the quickest answer, and it is free.
For a studio or a class that reads a lot, a membership removes the limit at every tier, and institutional access covers a whole cohort.
Things that will not help
- Moving to another wi-fi network. Most shared networks have the same cap, so you would be joining somebody else's count partway through.
- Switching to mobile data. Mobile networks routinely place many customers behind one address, so this often changes which crowd you share with rather than escaping one.
- Waiting a while. Daily counts clear at midnight UTC and not before.
Why it works this way
Counting anonymous reading has to key on something. A browser cookie is the closest a signed-out visitor comes to an identity, so that is what the allowance follows. The address cap exists because a cookie can be cleared: a per-browser count on its own would let one address reset the allowance as many times as it liked.