Well…… that is because ERIC, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education, discovered “personally identifiable information” in some of the articles. As a result, they pulled down all the full-text items in order to evaluate each document and remove any “personally identifiable information” if present. Here is the full statement from ERIC (http://www.eric.ed.gov/pdf_availability.html):

Dear ERIC Community,

We have currently disabled access to many ERIC full-text PDFs due to the discovery of personally identifiable information in some documents. A team is in place to check each PDF to see if it contains personally identifiable information. Due to the quality of many of the documents, a large portion of the search has to be done by hand. This will take several weeks, but our primary concern is to protect the privacy of individuals.

To minimize the burden on our users, we will prioritize searching the PDFs that users request. If you would like to request a PDF to be returned online, please fill out this form, which requires only the document’s ERIC record number and your email address. Full-text PDFs will be returned on a rolling basis. We will be posting the list of newly released documents here.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and want to thank you for bearing with us through this unexpected delay.

The ERIC Team

In the meantime, we’re trying our best to pool together our physical holdings of ERIC, while also working with local colleges and universities to share each others collection of ERIC holdings. If you need a full-text article from ERIC, please email the Reference Desk (reference1777@eastern.edu) with the article’s citation and we’ll work on getting you access to it. We’ll also notify the Eastern Community once all ERIC documents are again available online.