Academic Staff Support Guide

The MyUni Library team at the front desk of the Libraries can direct you to our resources, answer any general enquiries, and refer you to appropriate colleagues and departments within Libraries and Collections. Frontline services are provided by MyUni Library at both the Singleton and Bay campus Libraries.

You can also make general enquiries, discuss your library account, or report e-access issues using the online Service Desk linked below.

Exploring, accessing and borrowing from the Library's collections

The library catalogue is called iFind. A guide is available below.  You can borrow up to 30 items from the library. Our borrowing web page has details of how to renew and request books.

Finding Databases and Journals

The library guide for your subject area will show the most relevant search tools for you.

Staff can make requests via document supply for articles which are not available in our subscriptions.

• A-Z of Databases

  You may also find journal articles in numerous other databases. A full list of the databases that the library subscribes to can be found here.  We also suggest free or open access databases and collections.  You can access list of databases by discipline area in the drop-down box for Subjects.

• Document Supply

  If the resource you need for your research is not held in the Library, use the Document Supply Service to request an interlibrary loan. Please check the library catalogue iFind before requesting an interlibrary loan.

The Library provides access to a few Current Awareness sites to help you keep informed in new articles, proceedings, and publications on your selected topic.

The university has a subscription to Browzine. This is available as a web page or an app and allows you to scan through recent issues of the journals you are interested in.

The Research Support team is able to advise on a wide range of Open Scholarship / Open Science topics.

Remit:

• The team support the Research Excellence Framework (REF) open access policy and reporting on compliance.
• Support with the Swansea University Research Publications Policy 2023.
• Support researchers to comply with funder policies and open access publishing requirements.
• Manage the UKRI Open Access fund, Faculty Open Access Payments and administration of the institutional publishing agreements.
• Support researchers with licensing agreements and copyright.
• Manage the Research Information System (RIS).
• Manage the e-thesis mediated deposit service.
• Manage the repository, Cronfa.
• Support publishing and research impact activities.Provide research skills, bibliometrics and postgraduate research support and training.

You may also contact them with copyright queries for teaching or research related activities. Research data management queries are directed to the guidance material on the website or you can contact Alex Roberts via email.

Contact details:

Email: LibraryResearchSupport@swansea.ac.uk  / openaccess@swansea.ac.uk
Website: Library Research Support
Blog: ResearchNews
Twitter: @sulibressupport

We have five libraries, supporting different subject areas.

• Bay Library - Supporting subjects taught at the Bay Campus.
• Banwen Library - Banwen Library is a branch of the South Wales Miners’ Library and is based at the DOVE Workshop, Banwen.
• ​Singleton Park Library - Supporting subjects taught at Singleton Campus, the Library also houses the Richard Burton Archives, including South Wales Coalfield material and the University archives.
• South Wales Miners Library - In Hendrefoilan, supporting DACE and housing the South Wales Coalfield collection.
• St David's Park Library - In Carmarthen, supporting Medicine and Health Science subjects.

Further details can be found on our webpages.

We are part of the Sconul Access scheme which allows you to use other academic libraries if that is convenient for you. Jisc Library Hub Discover is the online catalogue for all major HE, research, or national libraries in the UK and Ireland.  You can consult this catalogue for details of holdings outside our Library which you may wish to visit via Sconul or request through interlibrary loan.

Using repositories as sources of supply for free online access to scholarly publications.

Increasingly full-text peer reviewed research articles are available through institutional and subject repositories. Open access resources can be used to find published information swiftly and often without cost. Open access material includes journal articles, scholarly and scientific monographs, educational resources, metadata, digitised material and research data.

Search via:

• Cronfa - Swansea University institutional repository
• Cronfa E-Theses - Swansea University open access theses
• Swansea Vision Swansea University Computer Vision & Machine Learning Group

• African Journals Online provides access to scholarly research publications from Africa
• arXiV - Open access research papers in physics and related disciplines. This is a subject pre-print service
• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search) - Access over 120 million documents from 6000+ sources. >60% of indexed full text documents are available via open access
• BioImage Archive -  The BioImage Archive is a public data resource that archives and makes available biological image data, of all scales, from molecules to entire organisms. A central archive promotes open data, provides reference data for the research community and allows for new scientific discoveries to be made with existing data across all imaging modalities and accelerates the development of new and improved image-analysis methods. 
• bioRxiv - This is a subject pre-print service for Biology
• CogPrints – Self-archived papers in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, Philosophy, Biology
• CORE - Aggregating the world’s largest collection of open access research papers
• DOAB - Discover Open Access books
• DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
• Europe PMC - Search worldwide, life-sciences literature
• HathiTrust Digital Library - Search a collection of millions of digitised titles from Libraries worldwide
• NORA - NERC Open Research Archive
• PhilArchive - The largest open access e-print archive in philosophy. Formerly known as the PhilPapers Archive, it is built on and integrated with the PhilPapers database.
• PhilSci Archive - Pre-print  service for the Philosophy of Science 
• PubMed - Free MEDLINE clinical science and medicine database. Some free articles available
• redalyc.org provides access to research published across Latin America and the Caribbean
• RePEc – Research Papers in Economics
• SocArXiv - open Archive of the Social Sciences. This is a subject pre-print service
• SSRN -  An interdisciplinary service
• Unpaywall - An open database for free scholarly articles. Get an Add-on for your browser to automatically check for legal open access articles

Disciplinary and multi disciplinary repositories

• OAD - An extensive list of OA disciplinary repositories or subject repositories is available via the Open Access Directory (OAD) site.

Open Access Books
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books: Search for full text books.

OAPEN: OA Books Toolkit

Open Educational Resources

• OER Commons is a high quality public digital library providing content from a worldwide community of educators.
• MERLOT The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. View the YouTube introduction.

Pre-Print Servers
Preprint manuscripts are the Author's Original Manuscript (AOM) before journal peer-review. There are many online subject pre-print repositories which contain early versions of research articles. Some academic disciplines commonly use preprint repositories, e.g ArXiv, SocArXiv etc.

Swansea University Open Research Data

• Zenodo for the Swansea University Open Research Data Community