Research Integrity

The integrity of our authors' research and of the entire publishing process is critical. Please see below for details of our editorial policies, approach to open access licensing, research data, indexing, archiving, transparent pricing, our professional affiliations, dedication to open source, and to ensuring that our customers stay with us out of choice, not because of lock-in.

Editorial policies

Ubiquity 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. Through membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), our editors and editorial boards receive ethical guidance and professional networking opportunities, ensuring that information and training on developing topics and guidelines is provided. Ubiquity Press maintains and develops a core set of editorial practices, helping to ensure consistently high quality and ethical publishing practices across the platform. Our journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice. Core policies include:

• All contributing authors must adhere to authorship is defined as per our authorship guidelines

• All authors, reviewers and editors must declare all competing interests, as defined on our competing interests policy

• Peer review is conducted in a thorough and independent workflow. Whilst journals may have their own workflows, the core policy must follow our peer review policy

• All submissions are checked for plagiarism and duplicate publication, via Crossref's Similarity Check service, powered by iThenticate. Reports are assessed by trained editorial staff, who follow COPE guidelines on how to deal with suspected cases of plagiarism or related ethical issues

• Post-publication edits must adhere to our Correction and Retraction policy

• The use of AI is fully declared and conforms to our Artificial Intelligence policy

• All special collections/issues must exceed the minimum standards of editorial oversight, as defined in our Special Collection guidelines

• Journals are encouraged to employ strong data sharing policies, with the Ubiquity Press Reproducibility policy acting as a baseline

• Receipt of appeals, complaints or allegations of misconduct will be dealt with as per our policy

Policies are reviewed and develop regularly to ensure that they represent current expectations and workflows.

Open Access

All Ubiquity 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 are a signatory of 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 Ubiquity 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.

Journals and books can be archived to an institutional repository, or with subject-specific repositories such as Dryad on request (note, archiving may incur a fee).

Authors also have the option of submitting data or software metapapers to any of our journals, or to a specifically themed metajournal. This makes the associated resource more easily citable, and provides an additional incentive for the author to make it available.

Indexing

All Ubiquity Press content is indexed with Crossref and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and made publicly available via the Initiative for Open Citations. 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.

We index journal and book content with subject specific archives such as Google Scholar, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), PubMed Central or Europe PMC / PMC Bookshelf. Our books are also disseminated via OAPEN. Each journal will display where they are indexed on their own websites.

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 Ubiquity Press content will always be made available as open access, in any eventuality.

All Ubiquity Press journals are also connected to the PKP Preservation Network, helping to ensure the permanency of online journals.

We fully support and encourage author self-archiving of all content (sometimes termed 'green' open access). All Ubiquity Press journals are registered with SHERPA/RoMEO to ensure that the license terms and self-archiving policies of the journals are 100% clear.

Transparent Pricing

Ubiquity Press has been a leader in transparent pricing, since it first displayed a breakdown of how the Article Processing Charges (APCs) were calculated, back in 2013. We continue to believe that trust in publishing can only be attained when transparency in pricing is clear. We maintain a breakdown of how our APCs are calculated on our Journal Publishing page. Due to our costs being largely proportional to the size and complexity of each book, a breakdown is not possible for our book serivces, so instead we provide a range of example pricings on our Book Publishing page. Authors proposing a book will be given a clear breakdown of the costs once the nature and scope of the project is known.

Professional Affiliations

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) provides an opportunity to work with other publishers to further the interests of researchers in advocating open access throughout the world, and requires all members to follow a Code of Conduct.

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the largest international trade association for scholarly and professional publishers, provides access to professional training materials and events.

The Association of University Presses is an organization of mission-driven publishers whose members strive to advance scholarship through their offerings. The Association’s mission is to assist its members through professional education, cooperative services, and public advocacy.

The Association of European University Presses is an organisation of and for university presses across Europe to help them build stronger relationships, to co-operate and share knowledge in order to reach common goals and to jointly address important issues.

No Lock-in & Open Source

Our contracts do not seek to possess journals or books content, but instead to support societies in operating them. The only titles we own are those that we have started ourselves. All copyright to the published content is retained by the authors, Ubiquity Press does not retain rights to the published content and the content can be transferred away from Ubiquity Press if the society decided to change the publisher. All of our journal contracts include a 'no lock-in' clause, meaning that a title can break from the agreement at any point, for any reason, to move to a different publishing platform.

Ubiquity 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.

Core components of our platform such as Open Journal Systems and the Invenio RDM repository system are fully open source, so our partners can continue to operate them independently if they choose to.