This page provides advice and guidance on getting your work published. The focus is primarily on journal articles and monographs.
On this page:
Throughout the publication process, your work will take various forms both before and after being peer reviewed. At each stage your work can be shared, and we encourage this in order to keep research as open as possible, acknowledging it should also be kept as closed as necessary. The below graphic (also available to download in an accessible PDF format) represents the publication process. Navigate through the tabbed boxes to find out more about each stage of the process, and how your work can be shared.
A preprint is a version of a scholarly work shared publicly before formal peer review. Posting a preprint allows researchers to rapidly disseminate findings, receive early feedback, and increase the visibility of their work. Most preprints receive a DOI, making them citable and helping to highlight new ideas.
At the University of Essex, preprints support research visibility and align with open access goals. They complement traditional publishing and can be a useful part of your research dissemination strategy. For more, visit our Research Visibility Guide.
An Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) is the version of your paper that has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but before the publisher has applied final formatting, typesetting or copyediting. It is sometimes called the post print. AAMs are often made openly available via research repositories such as the University of Essex Research Repository. This is usually known as self-archiving, or green open access.
By self-archiving your AAMs, you help maximise the visibility, accessibility, and impact of your research, as your target audience can read your work even if they lack subscription access. In addition to this, for REF compliance, all AAMs for all journal articles and conference papers with an ISSN must be made openly available within three months of publication, unless the final published version is made available open access.
Many publishers have standard terms and conditions that intend to restrict how AAMs can be shared. This can include specifying embargo periods, adding conditions around version acknowledgment, and limiting reuse to non-commercial only. Our institutional Author Rights Retention Policy enables all AAMs for Essex-authored journal articles and conference papers to be made openly available under CC BY licences, therefore preventing any publisher-imposed restrictions. You can read more about our Author Rights Retention Policy here.
The Version of Record (VoR) is the final, published version of your research output. It is the version that appears on the publisher’s website, with full copyediting, typesetting, and final layout applied. It usually includes the journal’s branding, pagination, and DOI. The VoR is usually the version that is cited.
Sharing the VoR helps ensure that readers access the complete version of your research. It includes the most polished version of the text, figures, and supplementary materials, and is the version indexed in citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Making the VoR openly available sometimes includes a cost. You can read more about the different routes to open access via our Open Access Publishing page.
Researchers can deposit their VoR in the Research Repository either if they are the copyright owner (usually if the VoR is published open access), or if otherwise permitted by the publisher’s open access policy. If you are not the copyright owner and the publisher does not allow you to share the VoR, you can still make your work openly available through self-archiving the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM).
The more visible you and your research are, the more likely it is:
You dedicate time and effort to your research; ensuring it is visible maximises that commitment.
Rather than thinking of managing your visibility as a luxury to do when there is time, it's important to factor increasing visibility into the core of your research process. Take a look at our Increasing Research Visibility page to find out more.
Online research profiles act as your identity online and provide a key mechanism for sharing your work both within and outside of academia.
There are many profiles to choose between, with some being specialised for researchers, and some being open to everyone. Depending on what you want to achieve, your target audience, and your field, some will work better for you than others.
Due to their effectiveness at increasing research visibility, the University requires all researchers to create ORCID and Google Scholar profiles. Additionally, we recommend choosing one or two more that you can update regularly to help boost your visibility online.
Head to our Online Research Profiles page to find out more about some common profiles researchers may find useful, and download guidance on setting up your ORCID, Google Scholar, and RIS profiles.
The University of Essex strives to make content available digitally via our online reading lists. As part of the Library’s ongoing work to ensure all students can access their essential readings, we want to partner with academics. This partnership starts from publishing and continues through to the curation of reading lists.
Making resources available online has a positive impact on the student experience for many reasons, including benefitting students based off-campus and meeting different accessibility needs.
E-books represent a significant portion of our online resources, yet there are often difficulties involved with providing access to these resources. We therefore want to work with you to ensure e-books written by our Essex researchers are as readily available as possible.
Agreements that authors sign when publishing e-books affect the ability of their students to read their work. This is because libraries can only purchase e-books which are licensed for universities.
In addition to this, some other things to consider are:
Being aware of the above points when signing author agreements for publishing e-books can help to stop these terms restricting student and researcher access to your work.
When negotiating your contract with a publisher, we recommend that you ask your publisher about their e-book policies. The “Questions to Ask Publishers” below will help with this. If you’re not happy with their responses, you can ask that they insert into your contract the “Contract Clauses” suggested below.
If you’re still not satisfied with their policies and the terms of the contract haven’t been changed, you may want to consider a different publisher. Alternatively, you could also publish your book under an open access model, giving everyone access for free. The OA Books Toolkit is a great resource to help you with this. You can also get in contact with us in the Library for advice on publishing.
You can speak to our Research Support team or your Academic Liaison Librarian via our contact us page if you’re in any doubt about any of the answers you receive to these questions (or about the questions themselves).
If you are unclear about, or are unhappy with, the publisher’s responses, ask them to insert the following clauses* into your contract:
*Clauses reused from Academic Book Investigation.
A group of academic librarians, researchers, lecturers and students from across the UK have recently compiled an open letter asking the government to investigate the academic publishing industry over its e-book pricing and licensing practices. You can read and sign the open letter and find out more about the Campaign to Investigate the Academic E-book Market on their website. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter using #ebooksos.
Visit the Library's blog for more information about how we are supporting this campaign at Essex. Leave a comment on the post to take part in the conversation.
The text within "making your books available to students" has been adapted from Can my Students Read my Books? on the Campaign to Investigate the Academic E-book Market website.
This page provides practical advice on how to share different versions of your work. For further advice and guidance, we'd recommend:
If you have any questions, or would like some support that isn't on our webpages, feel free to contact the Research Services Team.
Except where otherwise noted, this work by University of Essex Library and Cultural Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
