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 reviewed 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 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

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.