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The University of Westminster Press ensures that all editorial and peer review procedures are consistent and rigorous. In the case of book publishing the procedures for peer review reflect the practices and needs of various disciplines. UWP does not favour one specific procedure for all types of project, but we do as a minimum require that reviewing be conducted by independent peers, and that editors (including series editors) should not act as the sole reviewers for projects.
All journals and book proposals or manuscripts need to meet our submissions guidelines (for Books or Journals) and match the Press's subject areas of interest and format strands; such proposals are sent for external peer review prior to an editorial decision on whether to accept or reject a submission.
Proposals for UWP ‘Policy Brief’ series or specific subject strands of policy briefs are peer reviewed internally within the University or externally before being accepted as publications for UWP. Peer review is overseen by an editorial board for each journal of book series, with individual titles outside of journals or series reviewed by two external reviewers.
Final scripts for policy briefs are reviewed internally by relevant experts within the University and amongst the editorial board. Care is taken to ensure that no conflicts of interest may arise, though the University of Westminster Press and the Press’s editorial board reserves the right to insist on independent external review of final scripts of policy briefs should the need arise and for all publications to be kept apprised of script review in addition to overseeing final copyediting and proofreading.
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 and have access to their guidance. The press provides the option of open peer review, if requested under certain circumstances.
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.
Content from UWP is released under open licenses from Creative Commons giving preference for journalsto 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 avail open access to the research objects associated with their research. 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.
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.