Anti-plagiarism Checking
A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All journal articles and book manuscripts submitted to Ubiquity Press are automatically screened for plagiarism by the Similarity Check system from Crossref. This system compares incoming submissions to a large database of academic content, and alerts editors to any possible issues.
Rigorous Peer Review
SEE ensures that all research output, in both journals and books, is thoroughly peer reviewed by external reviewers, and offer the option of open peer review if required. Publications of a commentary or opinion nature may not be sent for external peer review but will include extensive editorial review and revisions. Through membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), our editors and editorial boards receive ethical guidance and professional networking. All of our journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice. For more information, visit our peer review policy page.
Open Licenses
All of SEE's content is released under open licenses from Creative Commons. We believe that only CC BY meets the requirements for true open access for books and journals, and strongly prefer CC0 for open research data.
We endorse the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which states that open access “…will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
We also endorse the Panton Principles, which state that "for science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open."
Research Data
We encourage authors to make the research objects associated with their publications openly available. This includes research data, software, bioresources and methodologies. This means that peer reviewers are able to better assess the foundations of claims made, and the research community and wider public are able to similarly validate authors’ work, and are more easily able to extend and build upon it.
All data sharing must comply with Institutional Review Board policies associated with the study approval and funding agency requirements. We recognize that in human subjects research the data may be challenging to anonymize and contain sensitive information about participants. The authors may choose not to share the data even if it is allowable by IRB protocol and/or funding agency. We respect the judgement of the authors in deciding if it is appropriate to share the data.
All journals and books can be integrated with their own repository on the Dataverse Network as standard, and additional integration with subject-specific repositories such as Dryad is implemented on request.
Indexing
All SEE content is indexed with CrossRef and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This means that all of our references are made available so that citations can be tracked by the publishing community, and the content is added to the Cross-Check anti-plagiarism database.
All of our article metadata is openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and the journals are registered with Open Archives.
Archiving
Our platform provider, Ubiquity Press, is a member of CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) our content is regularly archived with many of the world's leading research libraries. The CLOCKSS archive ensures that our content will always be made available as open access, in any eventuality.