Publishing your research

Before planning a publication, ensure your funder contract permits academic publication, especially if you are working with industry. If you intend to apply for a patent do not publish until you have sought advice from the should be deposited if your funder requires it, and even if not, this is good practice. There is evidence that doing so improves citation rates to the associated papers.

Other formats may be appropriate if engaging with industry or the public - e.g., exhibitions, trade journals and press releases.

Always remembering the overarching guidance around readership, rigour and reach, there are a number of journal listings that might help you in your search for the right place to publish. These include:

Bibliographic databases

(which feeds the citation benchmarking tool, SciVal).
lists over 300,000 different journals.

Journal matching tools which identify potential journals for your work based on the title, abstract and/or reference list of your manuscript:

For finding Gold Open Access journals
Only indexes Elsevier journals.
Focussed on Health Science.

Author-provided journal evaluations

. Author ratings of Open Access journals
. Author reviews for c3,500 journals.

Journal policy listings

Identifies journals' Open Access & preprint policies including embargo periods.
. Provides editorial policies for c.450 journals.

Our general advice when choose where to publish is to consider readership, rigour and reach - and in that order. Field-normalised journal citation metrics such as (Scimago Journal Rank) and (Source Normalised Impact per Paper) may offer a window onto #3 (visibility and reach). In some disciplines they may also offer a window onto #2 (rigour). But they never offer a window onto #1 (readership) – and that is top of the list. Please check with your Associate Dean (Research) as your School may have a list of preferred journal/conferences.

Be aware that with the advent of Open Access, there are an looking to cash in on authors' willingness to pay open access fees for publication. Follow the guidelines to ensure the journal you're thinking about is trustworthy. The following list of salient characteristics of potential predatory journals () is also very helpful:

1.	The scope of interest includes non-biomedical subjects alongside biomedical topics
2.	The website contains spelling and grammar errors
3.	Images are distorted/fuzzy, intended to look like something they are not, or which are unauthorized
4.	The homepage language targets authors
5.	The Index Copernicus Value is promoted on the website
6.	Description of the manuscript handling process is lacking
7.	Manuscripts are requested to be submitted via email
8.	Rapid publication is promised
9.	There is no retraction policy
10.	Information on whether and how journal content will be digitally preserved is absent
11.	The Article processing/publication charge is very low (e.g., < $150 USD)
12.	Journals claiming to be open access either retain copyright of published research or fail to mention copyright
13.	The contact email address is non-professional and non-journal affiliated (e.g., @gmail.com or @yahoo.com)

As the number of is on the increase, professional bodies are developing guidelines on what consitutes authorship of a scholarly paper. It is important to give credit to all the contributors to an output according to the conventions of your discipline. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) provide some useful resources. See also:

You might also use the (CRediT) to identify all those who were involved in the research underpinning the output, regardless of whether they constitute authors. More journals are now asking authors to clarify the roles of those involved in producing an article by means of the CRediT taxonomy.

There are two main routes to open access journal publishing, Green and Gold, which are described on our open access pages. Unless your research is funded by a UK Research Council, there are no central funds for payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Gold publication. However, we do subscribe to a number of publisher Gold open access deals, some of which allow ALL 天堂视频 staff to publish Gold open access for no additional charge. Please check out the for further information. Also, please remember that many Gold open access journals do not charge an APC at all. These are listed in the . Always work within the readership, rigour and reach guidelines when choosing a journal.

It has already been indicated that for REF 2027, the expectation is that monographs should also be made available on open access. The has produced a Guide to open access monograph publishing for arts, humanities and social science researchers. OAPEN has collated an which aims to help book authors better understand OA book publishing and to increase trust in open access books.

In an effort to improve openness and transparency in journal publishing - and to provide reviewers with credit for performing peer review, the concept of open peer review is gaining traction. A great introduction to open peer review is available at . There are many differing definitions of open peer review, the following list of traits is taken from ).

Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other’s identity
Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
Open participation: The wider community are able to contribute to the review process.
Open interaction: Direct reciprocal discussion between author(s) and reviewers, and/or between reviewers, is allowed and encouraged.
Open pre-review manuscripts: Manuscripts are made immediately available (e.g., via pre-print servers like arXiv) in advance of any formal peer review procedures.
Open final-version commenting: Review or commenting on final “version of record” publications.
Open platforms (“decoupled review”): Review is facilitated by a different organizational entity than the venue of publication.

Researchers can get credit for the peer reviews they have written by creating an account with . This allows you to keep a record of your peer review activity. Similarly, anyone can provide a post-publication peer review report on an existing paper using . For examples of platform-based post-publication peer review, see , & .

When choosing a book publisher, a good starting point is to see who publishes the books you are reading. You may also want to look at the publishers of the book submissions appearing in the top quartile in your REF UoA (ask your ADR for details). Colleagues may have also have experiences of different publishers so do ask around. The has produced a Guide to open access monograph publishing for arts, humanities and social science researchers. The and the checklist for books and book chapters are useful resources to consider when choosing a publisher.

If you're writing a book you might want to check out the and get the to check your contract. For a fee of £100 (less if you are under 35) they will provide an independent review of any contract you might wish to send to them.

If you want to self-publish work (e.g. Working Paper series) advice on or is available. Depositing an output on the Data Repository is another way of getting a DOI for your output.

There is plenty of advice out there on writing a good paper. See the Nature article .

Writing a good title and abstract is also important as not only do they help readers to decide whether to read your paper, but search engines use keyword from abstracts to decide whether (and how highly to rank) your paper in search results. See Emerald's advice on and advice from Taylor & Francis on for more information.

See also all the books on scholarly and scientific writing in the Library at 808.0665. For example: by Robert Day and Barbara Gastel (2012) and by Angelika Hoffman (2014).

The Mathematics Learning Support Centre offers all members of 天堂视频 statistics support via .

You may wish to use online tools such as which runs an automatic check on your manuscript for referencing and statistical reporting or to check your statistical reporting.

Most journal publishers do not consider the deposit of a thesis on an Institutional Repository, such as 天堂视频's Research Repository, to be 'prior publication', although you should always check with the journal you intend to write for in advance. In most cases, you should not be prevented from publishing parts of your thesis as a journal article. However, with the increasing use of plagiarism detection software by publishers, some researchers are finding that their thesis-based articles are being 'desk-rejected' by publishers on the grounds that they largely match the text of their original, open access thesis. This can usually be resolved through correspondence with the Editor, however in some cases, rewording is required.

Book publishers usually require a thesis to be considerably reworked before it is considered suitable for publication as a monograph. The availability of the thesis in the Institutional Repository should therefore not affect publication, but it is worth checking with the publisher you hope to write for in advance. The University of Sheffield maintains a which may be useful.

The Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) have produced some .

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