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    LSHTM Press Research Integrity



    Peer Review

    LSHTM Press adheres to the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to ensure ethical editing and publishing.  A range of peer review models are supported, depending on which is most suitable for the publication.



    Open Access and Copyright

    LSHTM Press is a fully open access publisher.  All of our publications are free to read and published under Creative Commons licenses.



    ORCID

    LSHTM Press strongly encourages all its authors, editors and reviewers to register for an account with ORCID.  Registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published work, ensuring that the author receives the correct credit for their contributions.



    Indexing

    All content published with LSHTM Press is indexed with CrossRef and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).  All of our article metadata are openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and the journals are registered with Open Archives.



    Archiving

    LSHTM Press content is LOCKSS enabled, and copies of all publications are made available via LSHTM Research Online, the School's open access repository.



    Author Identification

    LSHTM Press is committed to ensuring that author names can be submitted and displayed in an accurate and culturally sensitive way. ORCID identifiers, rather than names, will be recommended for author identification. It will not be mandatory to provide a surname on submissions.



    Research Data

    The following applies to all LSHTM Press academic journals, unless otherwise noted.

    LSHTM Press expects all authors to make available any research outputs commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate and/or reproduce reported findings outlined in the paper. This may include:

    • Data: A “minimal data set” that contains measurements or other factual information that are necessary to validate and/or reproduce research findings.
    • This should be accompanied by documentation that enables data to be understood.
    • Code: Software, processing scripts, or other code created by the authors that are necessary to perform relevant processing tasks and workflows upon data. This should be accompanied by documentation that enables code to be understood and applied.
    • Materials: Other documents relevant to the research, such as interview guides, survey forms, procedures.

    The research outputs must be accompanied by documentation that enables the above to be understood and applied in practice, such as data dictionaries and code guides.

    Availability of support material

    A dedicated ‘Availability of support material’ section should be provided in the paper. This should provide appropriate citation for research outputs that underpin the paper. Information should include:

    • A citation of each research output
    • Access status (open, controlled, closed),
    • An explanation of the reason for any restriction and access conditions to be met (if controlled access)

    Hosting

    Authors are encouraged to deposit research outputs that underpin reported findings to an appropriate FAIR-aligned public repository and obtain a Persistent Identifier (PID). This may be a subject-specific repository tailored to the requirements of a designated community, an institutional repository that makes available research outputs produced by its academics, or a cross-disciplinary/general repository that accepts many types of research output. FAIRsharing.org and the Registry of Research Data Repositories provide repositories that may be appropriate.

    File formats and standards

    Research outputs should be made available in a form that allows them to be accessed, analysed, and/or combined with other information with minimal barriers. To enable this, the use of well-documented, domain standards and open file formats are encouraged. If a proprietary format must be used (e.g. as a result of it being the de-facto standard used by software tools in a research field), the information must also be made available in an alternative open format.

    The FAIR Sharing portal provides examples of data and metadata standards relevant to scientific research.

    Access and reuse

    Access procedures should be appropriate to the research outputs being made available.

    • Authors are encouraged to make research outputs openly available under a permissive licence, such as CC0 or CC-BY, where permitted.
    • Research outputs that contain information covered by ethical, legal, or other conditions that limit how it is made available and the purpose for which it may be used (e.g. data that may reveal participant identity) should be made available under controlled access conditions, where permitted. The reason for the restriction and the process for gaining access must be clearly described in the ‘Availability statement’.
    • Research outputs that contain information covered by ethical, legal, or other conditions that cannot be made available may be withheld. The reasons for the restriction should be clearly explained and contact information provided to enable further information to be requested.

    If the research output is made available by a third party, contact information for applying for access should be provided.

    If an author does not have the rights to distribute a research output, they must acknowledge the source and provide information on how it may be accessed or requested from the third-party.

    Authors from within LSHTM should also note the LSHTM Data Management Policy.