Research Integrity

Anti-plagiarism Checking

A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All articles submitted to Open Library of Humanities journals can be screened for plagiarism by the CrossCheck system from CrossRef. 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 reviewed by external reviewers, and offers 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. All of our journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice.

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.

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 UKSG 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 journal or book content, but instead to support societies in operating them. All copyright to the published content is retained by the authors.