Library Materials

Materials available at the University Library

You can search for books, articles, journals, databases, etc., provided by the University Library on the University Library's website.

You can find all of the University Library's journals in our discovery service, OneSearch. Most of our e-journals are also available in BrowZine, where you can collect your favourite journals in your own bookshelf, save articles, and set up alerts.

Course literature is always purchased by the University Library as e-books when possible; otherwise, in a few printed copies, one of which is a reference copy. Information about course literature is obtained from reading lists in Kursinfo/Ladok. Swedish titles are rarely available as e-books for academic libraries.

Linking to e-resources

If you want to link to the University Library's e-books or other e-resources, for example in a course room or in a reading list, you need to know the following:

For a link to any of our e-resources to work outside campus, it needs to go through LNU's proxy server, which it automatically does if you link to OneSearch or our database list. If you link directly to the article/book/database instead, you need to add the proxy server's web address https://proxy.lnu.se/login?url= immediately before the direct link.

Materials not available at the University Library

"Get it now" is a service for direct delivery of articles in PDF format. It is available to university staff and includes a large number of articles from journals that the library does not subscribe to but can provide access to in this way. The service is integrated into OneSearch and can be accessed by activating "Include materials outside the library’s collections" under the heading "Tweak my results".

To access other materials not available at UB, you can request an interlibrary loan or suggest a purchase to the library. Interlibrary loans are free of charge for staff. If it concerns the purchase of mandatory course literature, please specify in the comment field of the form: the course code, on which campus the course is given, and whether it’s a distance course.

Requests from the department for a new journal subscription or database should be sent to forvarv@lnu.se.

Open Textbooks

There are a multitude of freely available e-books published as Open Access. Previously, this usually applied to the publication of articles in scientific journals, but more and more people are also choosing to publish books or chapters as open access, i.e., openly available.

Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.

When you want to find literature published as Open Access, there are several different platforms/search services you can use. Free e-books can also be found via publishers’ websites. Here are some examples of major portals that collect books from various publishers.

Open Textbooks - Internationally

InTech Open Access Books contains openly accessible monographs, mainly in the field of physical sciences, engineering and technology, life sciences, health sciences, social sciences and humanities.

Open Textbook Library offers free access to open textbooks in various subjects such as business, computer science, education, engineering, science, law, humanities, and journalism.

DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. The service covers several different subject areas.

Open Access eBooks on JSTOR (JSTOR Journal Storage) is a digital library that offers access to a comprehensive collection of scholarly articles and books, among other things, in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in several other disciplines.

OpenStax texbooks provides free, open-source textbooks for various subjects and levels of education.

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a repository for Open Access books containing academic titles mostly in humanities and social sciences.

Open Textbooks - OER Commons ISKME's digital librarians have curated collections of Open Textbooks and full courses to help leverage OER in your classroom.

Open Research Library (ORL) is a portal that plans to gather all open textbooks from around the world. Here, books are available in various subject categories, and books are made accessible once they have received sufficient cost coverage from libraries or institutions.

Through this link, you will find publishers offering Open Textbooks. Publishers of OA books

Open Textbooks - Nationally

Several universities in Sweden publish literature Open Access. Here are some examples:

LiU Electronic Press publishes course material and learning resources openly and freely available to everyone.

Open Books at Lunds University is a platform for publishing open access e- books produced within Lund University. The platform is operated by the Libraries at Lund University.

Malmö University Press is an Open Access publisher and strives to disseminate high quality research results to a wide audience. We are non-profit, and work in a spirit of collaboration and openness - with close ties to researchers and academia.

Stockholm University Press is an open access publisher of peer reviewed academic journals and books.

In Sweden, there is also Kriterium.

Kriterium is a platform for the review, publication and dissemination of high-quality academic books, in accordance with the principles for open access.

In Libris you can search for open educational resources

by combining your subject with the search string (“öppna lärresurser” OR “öppna läromedel” OR OER OR “open educational resources”) in the subject search field.
For example, pedagogy (“öppna lärresurser” OR “öppna läromedel” OR OER OR “open educational resources”)

You can also use the Free online filter in combination with your subject.

If you need more help using Libris, there is also a quick guide and help section on their website.