Research Integrity

Anti-plagiarism Checking

A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All articles submitted to the Digital Medievalist are automatically screened for plagiarism by the CrossCheck system from CrossRef, so do all articles submitted to any other Open Library of Humanities journals. This system compares incoming articles to a large database of academic content and alerts editors to any possible issues.

Rigorous Peer Review

Open Library of Humanities 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. Through membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), our editors and editorial boards receive ethical guidance and professional networking. All of our journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice.

Open Licenses

All Open Library of Humanities 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 Open Library of Humanities 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.

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 Open Library of Humanities 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.

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 Open Library of Humanities 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 Open Library of Humanities journals are registered with SHERPA/RoMEO to ensure that the license terms and self-archiving policies of the journals are 100% clear.

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.

No Lock-in

Open Library of Humanities 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.

Our contracts with societies are also very different to those of other publishers. We do not seek to possess journals or books content, but instead to support societies in operating them. All copyright to the published content is retained by the authors, Open Library of Humanities does not retain rights to the published content and the content can be transferred away from Open Library of Humanities if the society decided to change the publisher.