Access to resources after graduation

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.

Associate SHU membership and walk-in access

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.

Application for extended access- writing a book based on your thesis

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

Open Access tools and search engines

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

Preprint servers and Open Access sites

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

Professional organisations

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.

Social media and news feeds

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.

Reference management software

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.