Research support
Publishing your research
Library and Learning Services can provide support and guidance when publishing your research.
Where to publish
Library and Learning Services will never tell you where to publish your research, but we can offer advice and resources that may help when trying to find a publisher.
Think. Check. Submit. aims to help researchers identify trusted publishers for journal articles and book chapters. The questions, tools and resources support researchers when considering potential publishers for their work.
They may also help identify any predatory publishers - publishers who take advantage and exploit researchers and their work.
For articles and journals: Think. Check. Submit. - Journals
For books and chapters: Think. Check. Submit. - Books and chapters
For conferences: Think. Check. Attend.
If you have received research funding, your research funder may have publishing and open access (OA) requirements. The Journal Checker Tool will help to check whether the journal you would like to publish in supports compliance with your research funder.
For further information and support on research funder policies, visit our Research Funder Open Access Publication Policies page.
York St John University does not have funds to pay for Book Publishing Charges (BPCs). If you have a grant or external funding, you should contact the Research Grants team in the Research Office for more information.
If you are thinking of publishing an open access (OA) book, the OAPEN Books Toolkit aims to help academics and researchers understand OA for books and provide guidance on publishing a book OA.
Bibliometrics may help when choosing a publisher or journal. You can check a journal's impact factor or use citation data to see what research is being published in a particular journal.
When using bibliometrics, researchers must consider them carefully and in context. Different bibliometric measures have limitations, and they are not always a measure of good quality. Different subjects and disciplines also value bibliometrics differently.
For further information about the metric resources available to York St John University researchers, visit our Measure your research impact page.
Publishing contracts
Once your research has been accepted by a publisher, you should receive a publishing contract. Make sure you read any contracts carefully and check that you understand all the terms. Publishing contracts can be negotiated - you don't need to sign the first contract you're given.
There are certain things you should consider when reading and negotiating your contract. These can differ depending on what you are publishing.
Will the deadlines conflict with any other projects or teaching?
Are royalty payments clearly outlined? Who will pay for any copyright permissions?
What will the cost and licensing options be for Higher Education institutions?
Do you need to become a member of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ACLS)?
Will the text be available in print and electronically?
Will an affordable library ebook model be available and on which platform(s)?
Will an accessible version of the text be available?
Does the publisher support OA - will the publisher allow a chapter to be made open on RaY?
Will you be able to use the research in your teaching?
Will you be able to build upon and use that research again in the future?
Have you received any research funding, and does the publish comply with funder policies?
Does the funder policies align with York St John's Open Access and Rights Retention policies?
Retaining copyright in publishing
In traditional publishing models, publishers may ask you to transfer copyright ownership to them when signing a publishing contract. As a result, research is under the control of academic publishers and authors may be restricted in using their work.
For work with ISBNs (books, book chapters) or audio-visual publications, where possible, we recommend you retain copyright by signing a licence to publish. This grants the publisher an exclusive right to publish that work while you retain some rights.
If you transfer copyright of these works to the publisher, you may need to get permission from the publisher to use the research in your teaching or to build upon the research in the future.
Further information is available on our related pages:
The ALCS is a not for profit membership organisation for writers that collects royalty money due to UK works (books, articles and scripts) from around the world and then distributes the money owed to members.
The money they collect is from 'secondary uses' of works, such as photocopies, digital reproductions and educational recordings. Anyone who has ever written anything that has been published or broadcast can join. See the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society website for further information.
For works published with an ISSN (journal articles, conference proceedings), authors can retain the copyright over their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) under York St John University's Rights Retention Policy.
This allows researchers to have their work made Open Access immediately on the University's institutional repository (RaY) at no additional cost, and avoiding any publisher set embargoes. This is made possible by authors placing a Rights Retention statement on a submitted work with a CC BY licence which automatically grants York St John a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to store and share AAMs on RaY.
For further information see the full Rights Retention webpage.
Benefits of Retaining rights:
- Authors have more freedom to use, modify and distribute their own work.
- Negotiating terms with publishers and retaining rights may allow embargoed or restricted work for teaching purposes.
- Authors can grant non-exclusive licences to others and can choose and control how their work is used on a case-by-case basis.
- Under York St John's Right Retention Policy, there is no payment for publishing work assigned an ISSN.
Paying to publish
York St John University supports the principles of open access (OA). Where possible we ask researchers to follow the Green or Diamond OA route.
- Green OA: a version of a research output is made available free of charge to readers, often through an online repository and usually with an embargo period set by the publisher. For research published with an ISSN, where the selected publisher has been pre-notified, York St John's Rights Retention Policy will apply and no embargo is required.
- Diamond OA: neither author or readers pay any charge and research outputs are published, made available immediately and can be reused according to the licence applied to the work.
Open Access community-driven framework initiatives enable multiple stakeholders to collectively fund OA content.
Find out more about the initiatives we have pledged money towards on our dedicated OA page.
Alongside supporting open access publishing initiatives, Library and Learning Services have some transitional agreements with publishers.
Transitional agreements are also known as Read and Publish agreements. They provide access to the publisher's subscription journals while also allowing our researchers to publish research articles with that publisher immediately open access (OA) without any article process charges (APCs) or with discounted/capped APCs.
Please note that the Library and Learning Services team and the Research Office do not have funding for APCs or BPCs (book processing charges).
Find out more about the agreements we are part of on our dedicated page.
