Systematic review guide

Open access publishing and depositing an accepted paper to Symplectic

Open access publishing makes your online scholarly work available, free of charge to anyone. It facilitates the discovery and sharing of knowledge and may be required by your research funder.

Imperial has an open access policy that enables staff to meet the requirements for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and their funders. You are advised to upload your work on acceptance to Symplectic, for deposit in Spiral, Imperial's institutional repository.

The following video will walk you through how to upload your work to Symplectic.

As well as choosing a journal that aligns with your review subject, discipline or intended audience you will also need consider the access options and quality of a journal.

ThinkCheckSubmit is a website that helps you to choose trusted journals for your research.

Jane, the Journal/Author Estimator, is a website that will compare your document to millions of documents in PubMed to find the matching journals that you may wish to consider for your research.

Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals (MIAR) allows you check where a journal is indexed.

Imperial's Journal Search Tool for Open Access Publisher Agreements. This search tool allows Imperial's staff and students to see whether journals are included in agreements that fully cover the open access fee, offer a discount, or whether they are not covered but you can apply to the Imperial Open Access Fund

If you are publishing in an open access journal check the following websites to ensure it is trusted:

• It has an entry in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• Publisher’s membership of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
• Publisher’s membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
• Publisher’s membership of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM).
• Named editor and editorial board – recognised experts in their field who include their editorial commitment on their own research profiles.
• Look at the editor’s profile on their university website, links to their online profiles (for example, on ResearchGate, Google Scholar or LinkedIn) for evidence that they are actual editors. Further indicators are membership of organisations such as the Council of Science Editors (CSE), European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

For further advice on submitting your manuscript for publication see Open Access which includes contact details for the Library Services' Open Access team.