Once you have graduated, you will not be able to access resources such as electronic journals via SHU. If you’ve secured a job in another university, or in an institution with its own access, this won’t be a problem. But what if you haven’t, and still want to keep up with the literature and news in your field?
There are are number of options outlined below. For more details, contact the team.
You can join SHU’s library service as an Associate Member. This will give you access to the walk-in database services. For more details see the guide to Associate status and the guide to the walk-in service.
If you are working on a book based on your thesis, you can apply to your faculty Head of Research Degrees for continued access. You must do this whilst still registered with SHU, using the Access To Resources Application Form
There are a number of Open Access search engines and tools you can use to find Open Access versions of publications. A few are listed here.
https://openaccessbutton.org/ Browser extension
http://unpaywall.org/ Browser extension
http://www.opendoar.org/ Search for open access repositories; can also search for publications
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/repositories/sherpasearchalluk.html Search for OA publications
https://doaj.org/ List of OA journals; can also search for articles
Many fields now have a dedicated pre-print server, and there is also an increasing number of open access platforms. A selection are listed here.
https://arxiv.org/ Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
http://www.biomedcentral.com/search/ Biomedical
http://www.biorxiv.org/ Biology
https://peerj.com/preprints-search/?journal=peerj Mainly Biology and Medicine
https://osf.io/preprints/engrxiv/ Engineering
http://www.chemrxiv.org/ Chemistry
https://f1000research.com/ Life sciences
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv Psychology
https://www.ssrn.com/ Social Science
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ Social Science
https://www.openlibhums.org/ Humanities
https://hcommons.org/ Humanities
https://figshare.com/ Multidisciplinary
https://zenodo.org/search?page=1&size=20&ln=en&subtype=preprint&type=publication Multidisciplinary
https://www.preprints.org/ Multidisciplinary
If you are a member of a professional organisation, it is worth checking to see if they provide access to publications- many offer access to important journals.
It is worth following organisations, publications, and authors on social media and /or subscribing to their website feeds- they will often post details of new work, tables of contents, etc.
You will continue to have access to RefWorks after you graduate. Remember to change the email address you use to a non-SHU address.
If you use another system, such as Mendeley or Zotero, your access was never linked to SHU membership and will remain the same after graduation.
It’s important to remember that suppliers of software can vary the conditions of access.