Check

It is important to ensure that all relevant requirements such as mandate compliance and open access will be fulfilled by your choice of publication. 

Mandate compliance

Before submitting your article to a journal, make sure you understand what the mandatory requirements and academic standards required of you. For example, you may have to fulfill requirements related to research data or open access.

Some of the mandates or standards you are subject to are:

• The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research 
• UQ Responsible Research Management Framework Policy
• Funder requirements and industry agreement.

Research data

Research data is an important part of research outputs. Research data may include methods, data files, software, code, transcripts and more. Check if the journal you plan to publish in requires you to submit your data and if you can make you data underpinning publications available. Publishing your research data can lead to:

• Increased chances of publication
• Improving validation and verification of results
• Increased visibility 
• Higher citation rate for data and publications
• Increased collaboration
• Minimised research-waste (null results).

Watch Research Data (Youtube, 3m5s) to see some simple ways to share your research data. 

If the journal requires you to link to your data, you may like to publish your data in a repository such as UQ eSpace. 

Manage your research data has more information about publishing data and information about data storage, security, retention, and sharing policies at UQ. If your project involved gaining ethical clearance, visit Ethics, integrity and compliance to get the relevant ethics approval before sharing any data. 

Open access and article processing charges (APCs)

Funders may require you to make your research open access. It is important to check what the requirements are for your research. As a UQ researcher, you will need to abide by the Open Access for UQ Research Publications Policy, which requires researchers to make their research publications openly available via UQ eSpace. 

Visit Open Access to find out more about types of open access, publishing in UQ eSpace, and article processing charges (APCs). 

You should always check whether there will be APCs before submitting your article to an open access publisher. Before you commit to paying an APC, you must be aware of why the journal is charging you to publish your research article. There may be no requirement for you to pay an APC.

Using the Green open access model, you can choose to make the author accepted version available via the institutional repository, UQ eSpace, and avoid paying any article processing charges.