Closed Access

The closed access icon represents paywalled or subscription-restricted scholarly content, indicating that readers must pay fees or possess institutional subscriptions to access the full text of research publications. This symbol serves as a visual indicator distinguishing proprietary content from open access alternatives in academic search results and reference managers.

In research discovery workflows, academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus display closed access indicators to inform researchers when articles require payment or institutional credentials. Citation management tools including Mendeley and Zotero use this icon to mark paywalled papers, while browser extensions like Unpaywall help researchers identify when closed access barriers prevent free article access.

From an open science perspective, this icon signifies more than just access restrictions - it represents the ongoing tension between traditional publishing models and open access movements, highlights equity issues in global knowledge access, and motivates researchers to seek legal alternatives through preprint repositories and institutional repositories. This distinction helps users understand the broader implications of access barriers in scholarly communication.

Closed Access is one of 158 icons in Academicons, made by James Walsh and released under Open Font License. It is drawn on a 256 × 512 grid.

Sign in (it's free), then open Get icon, Install with shadcn CLI, and pick your package manager to copy the command. It adds ClosedAccessIcon to components/icons/academicons-closed-access.tsx: one file, a size prop (24 by default) and every SVG prop, with no icon package.

Copy it as React (from Get icon, or the Code section): a typed ClosedAccessIcon component you paste into your project, with no package to install. Only the icons you import reach your bundle. It works in Next.js and any React app.

Open Get icon, then Copy as code, and pick Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid or Preact; the Code section shows each one too. Every version is one self-contained component with the SVG inside, and SVG and data URL copies are there for plain HTML and CSS.

With Pro, the shadcn.io MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client find the Closed Access icon, or any of 158 Academicons icons, and install it from a prompt.

It's drawn in currentColor, so it takes the text color wherever you use it: a class like text-primary recolors it. To bake a color in, set one in Customize before you copy.

Set width and height on the component, or a class like size-6. It's drawn on a 256 × 512 grid, so it stays sharp at any size. Customize also sets the size it exports at, its padding and rotation.

Yes. It follows the text color, so with text-foreground (or any theme token) it changes with your light and dark themes. The icon is a vector, so it needs no separate dark asset.

Next to a visible label it's decoration: add aria-hidden="true" so screen readers skip it. Standing alone, as in an icon button, give the button a name instead, like aria-label="Closed Access", so screen readers say what it does.

Yes. ClosedAccessIcon passes every SVG prop to the svg element, so <ClosedAccessIcon aria-hidden="true" /> works, and so do role="img" with aria-label, or a title child, when it carries meaning on its own.

Yes. Open Get icon, then Download file: SVG for code or design tools like Figma; PNG, WebP or JPEG at 512px; or an ICO favicon with 16, 32 and 48px inside. Each one uses what you set in Customize.

Yes. The Open Font License allows commercial use; the icons can't be sold on their own. The full terms are in the license, linked on this page.

No visible credit is required: Open Font License only asks that you keep the license notice if you ship the icons' source files. Icons installed with the shadcn CLI already start with a comment naming Academicons, James Walsh and the license.

Yes. Copying and downloading it is free, and the shadcn CLI install only needs a free account.

Its tags are access, restricted, subscription and locked. Each tag page lists the icons that carry it from every library, which is the quickest way to find a match for Closed Access in another set.