Help

Fuller help is being prepared.

In the meantime, here are the questions that come up most often about the digital edition archive.

Signing in

The archive asks for the subscription details your publisher holds for you — for most titles that is a membership or subscriber number, sometimes with a postcode or surname. The form shows exactly which details your subscription needs, so if it asks for one thing and you were expecting another, the form is right.

Your details are checked with the subscription house that manages the title’s subscribers. We do not hold your subscription record ourselves, which is why we cannot correct it — if your details are refused and you are sure they are right, your publisher is the one who can look into it.

If it says your details are not recognised

• Check the number against your most recent magazine wrapper or renewal notice — they change when a subscription is renewed under a new record.
• Leave out spaces and punctuation unless they are printed as part of the number.
• If you have tried several times in a row, wait a few minutes before trying again. We limit repeated attempts to protect subscribers’ accounts, so a burst of tries will be turned away for a short while even when the details are correct.

If sign-in says it is unavailable

That message means we could not reach the subscription house, not that anything is wrong with your details. It is usually brief — please try again shortly.

Being asked to sign in again

You stay signed in for 30 days. Separately, we re-check with your publisher about once a day that the subscription is still active — so if you have been browsing for a while and then open a full article, you may be asked for your details once more even though you never signed out. That is the check, not a fault, and signing in again takes you straight back to what you were reading.

Reading

Without signing in you can browse every cover and read the opening of any article. The full text needs a current subscription.

Your browser needs to accept our cookie to keep you signed in. If full articles will not open and you are sure you signed in, cookies being blocked for this site is the most likely cause.

Still stuck

Contact your publisher, quoting the title and the details you were using. See also Privacy, Cookies and Terms.