Publishing your research
Publishing your research is an integral part of building an academic career and establishing your reputation as a subject expert. The Academic Engagement Team: Open Research supports researchers to make informed decisions at each stage of the publishing process. We ensure your research reaches the right audience and that you maximise engagement and impact via promotion of your publications.
Planning for Publication
The creation of a publication plan is an essential part of managing your research and is more than a list of proposed research outputs. This your opportunity to articulate the rationale that is guiding your publication activity and to demonstrate that your choices satisfy funder requirements and safeguard potential REF eligibility of outputs.
Decisions that you make at this stage will also save you time and confusion at the submission stage.
Funded research: Open access and funded research (PDF, 507KB) provides information on funder policies, including the UKRI open access and open data requirements.
REF eligibility: Open access and REF (PDF, 456KB) sets out the current REF policy requirement and NTU’
Authorship: Determine authorship position for co-authored outputs and consider adopting the CRediT taxonomy for equitable and transparent authorship practice. Expectations on authorship are set out in NTU's Code of Practice for Research.
Preprints: Increasingly researchers are making use of preprints for the rapid dissemination of their research. This involves posting your original manuscript on a preprint server (an open online repository) prior to, or alongside submission for formal publication. Peer review can be a long drawn-out process and preprints provide the opportunity to get your work out there quickly, increasing its visibility and readership, as well as establishing the precedence of your work.
Preprints are part of the drive towards Open Research and their use varies by discipline; they form part of the scholarly record, so it is important to be aware of publisher copyright polices related to posting preprints. Further advice and FAQs (PDF, 471KB) are available to support you in this practice.
Publication Costs: Check to see if your funder will cover open access processing charges outside of their funding application (UKRI) or if you are allowed to write these into your bid. You may also want to include other costs in your bid (e.g. rights clearance).
Publisher discounts and deals: NTU authors can benefit from a range of agreements (PDF, 209KB) with publishers without the need for APC payment or ADR approval. Please be aware that these deals are reviewed frequently and the terms and conditions may change without notice.
Deciding where to publish
The following principles should inform every decision you make when deciding where to place your research regardless of publication type.
- Readership: Who do you want to know about your research and how will you get their attention? What publications do your intended audience read and which conferences do they attend?
- Rigour: Does your publication venue have high editorial standards and robust peer review practices? Do they provide transparent guidance around publication costs, copyright and licensing, and open research practices?
- Reach: Will your publication be as visible and accessible as possible to allow your target audience to find, use and cite your work?
Contact the Library Open Research Team to book a consultation to discuss your publication plan. This will cover a range of techniques and tools to inform your decision making process.
- Ulrichs ascertains the peer review status of a journal, how long the title has been established, level of readership, and where the journal is indexed.
- ThinkCheckSubmit is a useful checklist to help confirm that your journal is a trusted source and avoid giving your research to a predatory publisher.
- Use the analysis function in Scopus and Web of Science after performing a literature search to identify the top publication sources in your research field.
- Searching Library Hub Discover can help identify recently published books, so you can draw up a list of target publishers in your area of research field.
- Journal metrics and associated quartiles can be useful in identifying a title’s visibility, citation potential and processing speeds.
- Check a journal’s aims, scope, readership and preferred methodologies on their webpages.
- Ensure your target publication has an open access policy that meets the compliance requirements of for REF and external funders.
Developing a dissemination strategy
Effective dissemination relies on the use of varied channels to engage with an audience and to facilitate impact. Increasingly, funders will expect you to produce a dissemination plan as part of your application but it is good practice to create one for any research activity.
Looking for ideas and not sure where to start? The Dissemination GAME plan contains suggestions for supporting activities and links to downloadable templates that will help you identify relevant stakeholders, articulate your plans and track your progress.
Open access
Open access refers to research outputs that are available online and free at the point of access, without barriers such as subscription or registration.
As a researcher, you will need to ensure your compliance with multiple open access policies including the NTU Publications Policy, the open access policy for REF, and you may be subject to further requirements by your research funder.
Open access policies
NTU Publications Policy
As part of the NTU Publications Policy, academic staff are required to deposit, where copyright allows, the following research outputs into the Institutional Repository (IRep):
- Journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN
- Deposit as soon after the point of acceptance as possible and no later than three months after this date.
- Authors must provide the accepted and final peer-reviewed text.
- Following publication of the output, the depositing author is responsible for updating the record in IRep with full bibliographic details, including the date of publication. This needs to happen as soon as possible after the point of publication and no later than one month after this date.
- Compliance with this policy safeguards NTU output eligibility for submission to the REF.
- Book chapters and monographs that report original research
- Deposit as soon as possible after the point of the publication and no later than three months after this date.
- Practice-based outputs
- Deposit supporting digital content illustrating the nature of the work as soon after the point of publication as possible and no later than three months after this date.
Bibliographic details of all other research outputs should be deposited in IRep.
Open access policy for REF
Journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN accepted for publication after 1 January 2021 must be made open access to be eligible for submission to the REF. Further information is available in our guide on Open access and REF (PDF, 456KB).
Funder Policies
Our guide on Open access and funded research (PDF, 507KB) provides information on funder policies, including the UKRI open access requirements.
Depositing outputs
NTU researchers should deposit outputs in Worktribe so that they are discoverable and accessible via the institutional repository (IRep).