Peer Review

The University of Westminster Press ensures that all editorial and peer review procedures are consistent and rigorous. New book proposals are peer reviewed for consideration by the Press’s executive team before the offer of a provisional contract. Final acceptance of a completed script is always conditional upon at least two peer reviews, a response from the author to the reviews and then the approval of our Editorial Board.

All journals and book proposals or manuscripts need to meet our submissions guidelines and be a good fit for the Press's subject areas of interest, series and format strands.

UWP’s Editorial Board and its advisers are fully briefed on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) best practice guidelines. All of our journals adhere to the COPE mandatory code of conduct for best practice.

Anti-plagiarism Checking

Material is screened by editors working on UWP material based on their knowledge of the area in question and using widely available internet tools. The Press also uses the CrossCheck/iThenticate system from CrossRef for all articles submitted to our journals. This is a system which highlights any submissions with resemblances to plagiarised content after comparing submissions to its database of academic content. At an early stage this minimizes the dangers of releasing plagiarised content, and thus any problems whether deliberate or inadvertently created may be addressed without significant loss of time.

Open Licenses and Research Data

Content from UWP is released under open licenses from Creative Commons giving preference for journals to the CC-BY license which most closely reflects our wish for the least restrictive of the open access licenses for journals. Should UWP be publishing open research data, CC0 is preferred.

Where appropriate, authors of UWP publications will be encouraged to make associated research datasets and objects open access. Open data enables reviewers and researchers to more completely appraise the material and the conclusions of research, or in some circumstances to test or replicate such findings. In this way open access publishing is able to offer a fully accessible resource and accelerates the efforts of research communities.

The option exists for UWP journals to retain a repository on the Dataverse Network. Otherwise, fuller integration with other specific repositories like Dryad can be organised if required, thus more closely linking data with research conclusions.

Indexing and Archiving

Our content is indexed with CrossRef and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This enables the tracking of citations by the publishing and research communities and also ensures that such material is included in the CrossCheck anti-plagiarism database.

UWP registers its journals at as many suitable index locations as feasible and we work with our collaborators on ensuring the best performance in relation to high-impact index services. Article metadata is made openly available for indexing services via OAI-PMH. Journals are registered with Open Archives.

UWP are members of Portico. Our content is therefore frequently archived via many of the world's leading research libraries. This archive ensures our content will always be available as open access, whatever the circumstances.

As a proponent of open access UWP is happy to encourage author self-archiving of content – so-called 'green' open access. All of our journals are registered with SHERPA/RoMEO for ease of reference.