Publication Ethics and Research Integrity
Publication Ethics
i) Journal Complaints and Appeals Process
University of Westminster Press (UWP) will carefully consider complaints, appeals and allegations in line with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). This applies both pre- and post-publication.
When a complaint is made to a journal, it must be passed to the journal’s Editor, who must then inform the publisher, UWP, and address the issue following COPE guidelines. Where necessary, allegations will be referred to the appropriate institution for further investigation. Pending the outcome of an investigation, the published record will be updated accordingly, with a post-publication notice in the form of either a Correction or a Retraction. This notice will be linked to the original article (see ii for further details). A permanent digital object identifier (DOI) and universal resource locator (URL) link between the notice and the full article enhances transparency and the integrity of the publication record; only in rare cases, where it is in the public interest, will an article be removed.
Well-evidenced appeals to editorial decisions are welcome and will be handled by the journal’s Editor in the first instance, who will assess the appeal’s validity. If valid, the journal’s editorial board and/or external peer reviewers will review the appeal. A new editorial decision will be made based on the results of this review.
To submit a complaint or raise an issue of potential misconduct to a journal, or to appeal an editorial decision:
- Contact the journal's Editor with an explanation of your complaint or appeal. If you have a complaint regarding the editors of a journal you may, alternatively, address your complaint directly to the publisher by writing to r.baggaley@westminster.ac.uk.
- If the response to your complaint is not satisfactory raise the matter with the publisher, UWP (r.baggaley@westminster.ac.uk) who will investigate the complaint and decide whether a further investigation is required following COPE guidelines.
- Especially complex cases may be submitted directly to COPE for guidance on how to proceed.
Please submit complaints or appeals by email, by visiting the journal’s ‘Contact’ page. Our aim is to acknowledge complaints or appeals within 5 days of receipt, and to keep complainants updated throughout the process. If the resolution reached by the journal/publisher is not satisfactory to the complainant, the matter may be escalated to COPE or a similar, appropriate body.
ii) Journal Options for Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections
Where post-publication corrections or retractions need to be made, or if an article is to be removed, these will be accompanied by a correction or retraction notice to indicate the incorrect elements of the article and the extent of the corrections made, or the basis for the article’s retraction or removal.
Correction notices are issued to address relatively minor errors in the article’s content or changes that have been made to the article’s metadata. To avoid multiple versions of the same article being circulated, these corrections are strictly limited to, for example, errors of spelling and phrasing that affect meaning, data errors, or mis-citations. These changes are outlined in the corrections notice and the original article must be clearly linked to this notice. Corrections are usually made within a short time period after publication (typically within 7 working days).
Retraction notices are issued for major issues affecting the argument or substantive content of an article that a correction would otherwise not fix. When a retraction is made, following COPE’s Retraction Guidelines, a retraction notice will be issued, linking to the original article, which states very clearly and exactly which part(s) of the article are incorrect or unreliable, and therefore the basis for the retraction. A ‘Publisher’s Note’ will be added to the original article linking readers to the retraction notice.
Removals are only to be made in rare circumstances, where not doing so would infringe copyright or cause harm. In the case of an article’s removal, the contents of the article will be removed from circulation. It will not be downloadable as a file or displayed on the article's webpage. A notice of retraction will be issued in the same manner as a standard retraction notice, and it will include the reason(s) for the article’s removal. The original article’s metadata will remain, linked to the retraction notice.
iii) Journal Policies on Conflicts of Interest/Competing Interests
Competing interests can be financial, commercial, legal, familial, or professional. Authors must declare any conflict or competing interests that are relevant to the published article (as well as those that may be perceived to be relevant by others). To ensure transparency, neither editors nor board members may be involved in editorial decisions about their own scholarly work. Any published article that lists editors or board members as authors must include a ‘Competing Interests’ statement following the UWP journal guidelines.
iv) Journal Policies on Data Sharing and Reproducibility
UWP is committed to a more open research landscape and facilitating access to research by enabling reproducibility. UWP encourages authors of articles published in our journals to share their research data where relevant, including, but not limited to, raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, and materials.
v) Journal Policy on Intellectual Property
UWP journal authors retain their copyright but grant the ability for the publisher to disseminate the work under Creative Commons license CCBY 4.0 (and in very rare circumstances under other CC licences). Full details are available on the ‘Copyright’ section of the ‘Submissions’ page.
vi) Journal Policy on Ethical Oversight
Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement within the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. Authors are expected to follow their institutional policies for research ethics. For most research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or guardian in the case of children under 16). Peer reviewers are asked to comment on any ethical problems perceived within submissions.
vii) Journal Policies on Authorship and Contributorship
Articles should list names of all those who contributed to the published work, to ensure transparency and research integrity. Authors take collective responsibility for determining who should be listed as an author and the order in which they should appear. Individuals who have contributed to the article, but do not meet the full criteria for authorship, should be credited by name and affiliation in the ‘Acknowledgments’ section. Where editors wish to incorporate the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) system to acknowledge different models of contribution, this will be permitted on a case-by-case basis, although it is not a requirement.
Author Name Changes Post-Publication
In accordance with UWP’s core values of inclusivity and openness, we acknowledge that an author may change their name during their career. UWP will therefore support post-publication author name changes where we have the technical capacity to do so (i.e., access to PDF source files). This will be actioned without publicly announcing these changes via a correction notice. Requesting authors will not be asked to provide legal evidence or documentation, nor of the reason for a name change. However, they may be asked to provide evidence that they are the author of the article in question (for example, email correspondence relating to the submission or revisions).
Authors requesting a name change should contact the journal’s Editor by email, by going to the journal’s ‘Contact’ page.
Research Integrity
Anti-plagiarism Checking
A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All articles submitted to University of Westminster Press journals are automatically screened for plagiarism by the CrossCheck system from CrossRef. This system compares incoming articles to a large database of academic content, and alerts editors to any possible issues.
Rigorous Peer Review
University of Westminster Press ensures that all research output, in both journals and books, is thoroughly peer review by external reviewers, and offer the option of open peer review if required. Publications of a commentary or opinion nature may not be sent for external peer review but will include extensive editorial review and revisions. All of our journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice.
Open Licenses
All University of Westminster Press content is released under open licenses from Creative Commons. We believe that only CC BY meets the requirements for true open access for books and journals, and strongly prefer CC0 for open research data.
We support the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which states that open access “…will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
We also endorse the Panton Principles, which state that "for science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open."
Research Data
All University of Westminster Press journals and books strongly encourage authors to make the research objects associated with their publications openly available. This includes research data, software, bioresources and methodologies. This means that peer reviewers are able to better assess the foundations of claims made, and the research community and wider public are able to similarly validate authors’ work, and are more easily able to extend and build upon it.
All journals and books can be integrated with their own repository on the Dataverse Network as standard, and additional integration with subject-specific repositories such as Dryad is implemented on request.
Indexing
All University of Westminster Press content is indexed with CrossRef and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This means that all of our references are made available so that citations can be tracked by the publishing community, and the content is added to the Cross-Check anti-plagiarism database.
All of our article metadata is openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and the journals are registered with Open Archives.
For more information on where this journal is indexed, please view the journal's about page.
Archiving
As members of CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) our content is regularly archived with many of the world's leading research libraries. The CLOCKSS archive ensures that University of Westminster Press content will always be made available as open access, in any eventuality.
Where relevant we automatically archive journal and book content with subject specific archives such as PubMed Central or Europe PMC / PMC Bookshelf.
We fully support and encourage author self-archiving of all content (sometimes termed 'green' open access). All University of Westminster Press journals are registered with SHERPA/RoMEO to ensure that the license terms and self-archiving policies of the journals are 100% clear.
No Lock-in
The University of Westminster Press uses open, non-proprietary standards for all of its content, meaning that it can be easily transferred to archives and other publishers. All of our article XML is compliant with the Journal Archiving Tag Suite (JATS) schema.
We endorse and adhere to the NISO Transfer Code of Practice, which ensures that when a journal transfers between publishers, that librarians, editors, and other publishers are informed and treated fairly.
All copyright to the published content is retained by the authors, University of Westminster Press does not retain rights to the published content and the content can be transferred away from University of Westminster Press if the editors decide to change the publisher.