Portal de Periódicos CAPES is not something you sign up for on your own. If you searched for this page hoping to create a personal account, the short answer is: you can’t, and that’s by design. Access is granted to an institution, not to an individual — your university, research institute, or graduate program has to be affiliated with the Portal and enrolled in the federated-login system before anyone there can read a subscription journal from home. This guide explains exactly who qualifies, how the remote-login system (CAFe) works, and what to do when it doesn’t.
What the Portal de Periódicos CAPES actually is
The Portal de Periódicos CAPES (periodicos.capes.gov.br) is a national journal-access consortium run by CAPES — Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brazil’s federal agency for graduate-program accreditation and evaluation, under the Ministry of Education. CAPES negotiates and pays for subscription access to a large collection of international and national journal databases on behalf of affiliated Brazilian institutions, then makes that access available to the institutions’ students, faculty, and staff.
This is the same model used by national research-access consortia elsewhere — see, for comparison, how Jisc negotiates the UK’s national open-access agreements or how Projekt DEAL works in Germany. CAPES also runs Brazil’s graduate-program accreditation system and the Qualis journal-classification system — covered in full in our separate guide to CAPES: graduate accreditation, Qualis, and scholarships — but this page is specifically about getting into the journal Portal itself.
Who is actually eligible
Two conditions have to both be true before anyone can use subscription content on the Portal:
- The institution must be affiliated with the Portal — meaning CAPES has contracted access rights for that institution to some or all of the subscribed databases. Affiliation is arranged at the institutional level (typically through the library), not by individual researchers.
- The person must belong to that institution in one of the recognised categories: permanent, temporary, or visiting professors; undergraduate, graduate, and extension students; and permanent or temporary staff. There is no path for someone with no institutional affiliation to obtain subscription access, and no individual “researcher” account separate from an institutional one.
A third, easy-to-miss point: being affiliated with an institution that participates in CAFe (the remote-login federation, below) is not the same as that institution having paid access to a given database. An institution can be fully enrolled in CAFe and still show a login prompt or “content unavailable” message on a specific journal simply because its contract doesn’t cover that title.
On campus: how access normally works
From inside a participating institution’s network — a library computer, campus Wi-Fi, or any device on an IP range the institution has registered with CAPES — the Portal recognises the connection automatically and unlocks whatever the institution has contracted, with no login required. This is the default, and it’s why most students and staff never see a login screen until the day they try to use the Portal from home.
Off campus: how CAFe remote access works
CAFe (Comunidade Acadêmica Federada — “Federated Academic Community”) is the identity federation that lets you authenticate remotely using your own institution’s credentials, rather than a separate CAPES password. It’s operated by RNP (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa, Brazil’s national research and education network) and runs on Shibboleth, the same federated single-sign-on protocol used by systems like Shibboleth-based SSO generally and by federations such as InCommon in the United States and SeamlessAccess internationally. If your library uses OpenAthens or EZproxy for other subscriptions, the underlying idea is the same one compared in our OpenAthens vs. Shibboleth vs. EZproxy guide — CAFe is Brazil’s national instance of this same federated-login pattern, purpose-built for CAPES and other RNP-connected services.
In practice, logging in remotely means:
- Go to the Portal (periodicos.capes.gov.br) and select the Acesso CAFe option, rather than trying to browse the collection directly.
- Choose your institution from the federation’s list of participating organisations.
- You’ll be redirected to your own institution’s login page — not a CAPES page — and you authenticate with the same username and password you use for your institutional email or academic systems.
- Once authenticated, CAFe passes a federated identity assertion back to the Portal, which then unlocks whatever content your institution has contracted, exactly as if you were on campus.
Two things follow from this design, and both trip people up. First, CAPES itself does not issue or reset your login credentials — your institution’s IT department or library does, because the account is theirs, not the Portal’s. Second, CAFe authentication only confirms who you are and where you belong; it does not by itself grant access to a title your institution hasn’t paid for.
If your institution isn’t listed, or CAFe won’t work
If you search the CAFe institution list and don’t find your university, research institute, or graduate program, that means it hasn’t joined the federation — this is an institutional decision, made jointly with RNP, not something an individual user can request or fix themselves. The correct next step is to contact your institution’s library or IT department directly: they are the ones who initiate CAFe enrolment with RNP, and, separately, negotiate the institution’s subscription contract with CAPES.
If your institution is listed but the login still fails, the Portal’s own guidance is consistent on this point: remote access, whether via CAFe, VPN, or proxy, is the responsibility of the institution, not CAPES. Support requests should go to your institution’s IT or library staff first — they work directly with RNP to resolve CAFe authentication problems. Only if that doesn’t resolve it should you escalate to the Portal’s own support channel.
A few things that commonly get mistaken for a broken login, worth ruling out first:
- Access from an unrecognised computer or network shows only the Portal’s free, open-access content — this looks like a partial outage but is actually the system correctly not recognising you as affiliated.
- A login prompt on one specific journal usually means that exact title isn’t part of your institution’s contract, even though other titles work fine.
- Content outside the subscribed date range — subscriptions typically cover a defined span of years, so an older or very recent issue of an otherwise-accessible journal can still require separate purchase.
What’s actually included in the collection
The Portal is not exclusively a paywalled resource — it combines two layers:
- Subscription content negotiated by CAPES: international and national journal databases and full-text collections, available only to affiliated institutions with a contract for that specific resource.
- Freely available content, open to anyone regardless of institutional affiliation: a curated set of high-quality open national and international databases, theses and dissertations produced by Brazilian graduate programs, and open-access journal articles from titles rated in the top strata (A1–B2, roughly) of the Qualis journal-classification system that CAPES also administers.
This split is why an unaffiliated visitor to periodicos.capes.gov.br isn’t locked out entirely — they can still search and read the open layer — but will hit a paywall or login prompt on anything CAPES has licensed rather than opened.
Frequently asked questions
Can I create a personal account to access the Portal de Periódicos CAPES?
No. There is no individual sign-up path for subscription content. Access is always mediated through an affiliated institution — you authenticate as a member of that institution (via CAFe, or automatically on its network), not as an independent registered user.
What’s the difference between CAFe access and normal Portal access?
They unlock the same content. On your institution’s own network, the Portal recognises your IP address automatically. Off-campus, CAFe replaces that IP check with a login step, using your institutional credentials, so you get the same entitlements from anywhere.
My institution isn’t in the CAFe list — what are my options?
Ask your library or IT department to pursue CAFe enrolment with RNP. Until that happens, you can still use the Portal’s free/open-access layer from anywhere, and use subscription content only while physically on your institution’s recognised network, if it has one.
Why do I only see free content even though my university has a CAPES subscription?
This almost always means the system hasn’t recognised you as affiliated — you’re likely on an unregistered device or network, or trying to browse the Portal directly instead of going through Acesso CAFe. Confirm you’re using the CAFe login path and your correct institutional credentials.
Who do I contact if CAFe login fails?
Your own institution’s IT or library support first — remote-access troubleshooting is explicitly the institution’s responsibility, working with RNP. The Portal’s own support team is a second-line escalation, not the first point of contact.
For the related system CAPES also runs — the Qualis journal-strata classification that determines which open-access articles appear in the Portal’s free layer, and how it factors into graduate-program evaluation — see Qualis Periódicos (CAPES): what the strata mean and CAPES: graduate accreditation, Qualis, and scholarships.
