Library Research Support Services
Best practice guidelines for authors to maximise the promotion and reach of their work whilst satisfying funder and institutional requirements for open access and enabling the flow of publication data across systems.
Does your publisher requirement a payment in order to publish?
Before submitting your work to a journal, check that the publisher will not charge you a fee you cannot pay - see our 'flow chart' on identifying whether your chosen journal offers a Diamond, Green or author-fee-free Gold route to Open Access before going any further with your submission!
Does your funder permit you to publish in this journal?
Check that your journal is a compliant venue for that funder before going any further with your submission!
Ensure institutional affiliation is correctly listed
Always provide the full University of Plymouth affiliation (not just 'UoP' or department name) along with any other affiliation or group name.
Ensure UoP email is provided to the publisher
This is a requirement for publishers the university has Read & Publish agreements with in order for publisher systems to route authors correctly to their institutional approval dashboards
Ensure appropriate acknowledgement is given for UoP or external facilities provided in support of the work
e.g. HPC or PEMC according to the facility's own specific acknowledgement criteria. Where publishers provide fields for this data capture, use of UoP equipment and facilities as acknowledged by publications can be reported on at scale via tools such as SciVal, providing evidence of impact and supporting future investment.
Ensure appropriate acknowledgement to any funding sources is stated
This is a mandatory requirement for funders and can be audited via databases and bibliographic data tools such as SciVal.
Confirm the contribution of each author (according to CRediT where possible)
CRediT sets out 14 roles representing the different typical contributions to a scholarly output. CRediT has been adopted by many publishers and supports open research aims of collaborative, inclusive research.
Provide a Data Access Statement
Data Access Statements provide information about where the research data and other artefacts supporting the results reported in the paper can be found (either open links or contact details for data stewards according to FAIR principles)
Data Access Statements are mandatory for UKRI and Wellcome Trust
Data Access Statements are mandatory for UKRI and Wellcome Trust
Provide your ORCiD to the publisher upon submission
This should see your ORCiD profile automatically update upon publication via CrossRef integration
ORCiDs present in publications ensures an author's publications are accurately attributed to them
ORCiDs present in publications ensures an author's publications are accurately attributed to them
Act on Acceptance for REF 
Create or Import a template record for your publication in Pure within 90 days of acceptance by the publisher.
Add the Acceptance Date and minimal publication information
Attach the Accepted Manuscript as a .pdf file which Pure will push to PEARL (open access repository)
Upon publication, an updated record should be available for Pure to import and supplement the bibliographic materials
Add the Acceptance Date and minimal publication information
Attach the Accepted Manuscript as a .pdf file which Pure will push to PEARL (open access repository)
Upon publication, an updated record should be available for Pure to import and supplement the bibliographic materials
Upon publication, import the published record of your publication to Pure
If your work is open on the publisher site, you can upload the publisher's .pdf
Publish underlying datasets & link them to the publication
Good RDM practice will help avoid 'data dumping' (whereby a publisher requires a dataset when you publish your article)
Use Pure 'linking outputs' feature to connect related outputs
Use Pure 'linking outputs' feature to connect related outputs
Promote your work using the DOI
DOIs are trackable through tools such as Altmetric, PlumX and bibliometric analysis tools. See our promoting publications guidance.
DOIs are a permanent identifier with the DOI provider maintaining a registry of links
If your work is UoP published, e.g. a report/dataset, the Library can mint a DOI via Pure.
DOIs are a permanent identifier with the DOI provider maintaining a registry of links
If your work is UoP published, e.g. a report/dataset, the Library can mint a DOI via Pure.