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Our publishing ethics policy is founded upon LSE’s Ethics Code, which is a set of core principles underpinning life at LSE. The LSE Ethics Code can be found here.
LSE Press is based within the Library at the London School of Economics and academic oversight rests with the LSE Press Editorial Board, which reports to LSE Research Committee. Individual journals have their own editorial boards and editors-in-chief, and book series have their own series editors and boards.
Each member of the LSE Press publishing community should be aware of and follow the Ethics code outlined by the School.
Each member of the LSE Press publishing community is required to make decisions in a transparent way without regard to age, disability, gender (including gender identity),ethnicity and race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or social and economic background.
LSE Press follows the School’s guidance on authorship and considers authors should, as a minimum, have made a substantial contribution to the work and be accountable for the work in its published form.
Although authorship conventions vary across disciplines, and LSE Press journals and publications may have additional authorship guidance, substantial intellectual or scholarly contribution must include one and ideally a combination of two or more of the following:
This is the minimum threshold for authorship, and researchers should recognise that practice varies e.g., journals, disciplines, and institutions may require a higher threshold. Therefore, additional criteria may be applied for authorship in some publications.
The above principles are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to review and approve the final version to be published. Therefore, all individuals who have made any of the above listed contributions should be given the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.
Other contributions to the publication that do not fall under “author” should be acknowledged, and we recommend the use of the CRediT system to define the role of each contributor.
For further guidance on good authorship practices, see LSE Principles of Authorship on unacceptable authorship practices, good authorship practices, and resolving disputes.
In rare circumstances, pseudonymous authorship may be considered appropriate, but this should be discussed with the Journal Editor-in-Chief and/or LSE Press.
Authorship and AI tools
LSE Press adopts COPE’s position on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in research:
“AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.
Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.”
COPE position statement, 13 February 2023
Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. In such cases, the studies must have been approved by a formal ethics committee (such as the author(s)’ own institution’s ethics committee or institutional review board) and the authors should include a statement within the text detailing that this approval has been granted, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. For most research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained and documented from participants (or their parent or guardian in the case of children under 16), and is mandatory if the identity cannot be removed from the publication. The identity of the research subject should be anonymised whenever possible.
Authors must ensure work submitted is entirely original, not plagiarised and work that is not their own has been fully referenced within the text. Self-plagiarism (“presenting one’s own previously published work as though it were new”[1])is not permitted and authors must reference their previous work if publishing secondary articles from the same research.
As with all content submitted for publication, the author(s) must ensure that they have permission to use all third-party content included within the submission, including those sourced using AI.
In line with LSE’s policy on conflicts of interest, the purpose of LSE Press’s conflict of interest policy is to require the disclosure and management of actual, potential or perceived conflicts of interest.
LSE Press’s policy follows UKRI’s definition of a conflict of interest as "a situation in which an individual’s ability to exercise judgement or act in one role is, could be, or is seen to be impaired or otherwise influenced by their involvement in another role or relationship."
"Conflicts might occur if individuals have, for example:
"The existence of an actual, perceived or potential conflict of interest does not necessarily imply wrongdoing on anyone’s part. However, any private, personal or commercial interests which give rise to such a conflict of interest must be recognised, disclosed appropriately and either eliminated or properly managed."
Conflicts of interest do not always prohibit publishing with LSE Press or its journals, but they must be declared during the publishing process, and if necessary acknowledged within the publication and made clear to readers. Specifically:
Conflicts of interest that arise or come to light during the publishing process should be brought to the attention of the LSE Press team immediately.
Data sharing and reproducibility
In line with LSE’s research data management policy, we recognise that data sharing is an integral part of making research open and discoverable and that research data are valuable assets in their own right that require careful and efficient management for long term preservation and reuse. We expect that data that underpins LSE Press publications is shared in a public data repository, along with any scripts or codes that may have been used in data analysis. All data should be referenced in publications within a data access statement including a direct link to the data deposit (DOI is preferred) and a citation. Where data cannot be shared because of legal, ethical or commercial concerns a data access statement should still be supplied with the reasons for data absence outlined.
Please note that the above does not just apply to quantitative publications but to qualitative research. Interview transcripts, focus group observations, field notes, and any grey literature produced as part of the publication may also be appropriate to share in a public repository, provided it is fully anonymised, and consent has been sought from research participants before deposit.
You can find some recommendations for acceptable social science repositories at our Research Support webpage.
LSE Press is an open access publisher, and all our publications are free to read. We do not request a transfer of copyright from our authors, but licence publications using Creative Commons licences:
Authors are responsible for securing permissions to include any material from third party sources in their publications. Any queries or complaints regarding third party copyright should be directed to LSE Press lse.publishing@lse.ac.uk
LSE Press will treat all book and journal submissions as confidential. Authors will be informed when manuscripts go out for review. Editors and reviewers must protect the confidentiality of all manuscripts from submission to “in press”. Where anonymous peer review is in place, editors must protect the confidentiality of all communications with reviewers, their identity, and identities of authors for double-anonymous reviews. Unpublished material seen by editors or reviewers must not be used in their own research without written permission from authors.
All research publications by LSE Press will undergo a rigorous peer review process by subject experts. Peer reviewing arrangements for individual journals and book series published by LSE Press are determined by the editorial board for each journal or series. Details of their specific arrangements are available on their individual pages. LSE Press supports a range of peer review models, depending on which is most suitable for the journal, book or book series. All our publications are required to adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice and all reviewers to follow COPE’s ethical framework for reviewing, and LSE Press’s own guidelines on confidentiality, and declaring conflicts of interest.
Reviews for book proposals that are not part of a series are managed by the LSE Press team, under the guidance of the Chair of the Editorial board. Proposals (with sample chapters) that are deemed suitable for consideration are reviewed by a minimum of two external subject specialists, whose names are not disclosed to the author(s) (‘single-anonymous’ review). All proposals that have been externally reviewed are then subject to approval or rejection by LSE Press’s editorial board.
Complaints about our review, publishing processes and publications can be raised by anyone at any time, with either a journal editor, series editor, Chair of LSE Press’s Editorial Board or LSE Press team.
[1] American Psychological Association (2010) The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Sixth Edition, p.170.
The Library uses data from LSE Press to populate Wikidata with descriptive metadata for articles and books, making it more discoverable to search engines. The Library also creates author identifiers on Wikidata to link authors with their articles, their affiliation(s) and any pre-existing identifiers, including, but not limited to, ORCID, ISNI and ResearchGate. This increases the visibility of LSE Press content to the Semantic Web.
LSE Press recommends that all editors, reviewers and authors register an account with ORCID. ORCID is a unique and persistent ID that enables accurate attribution for scholarly work, ensuring that the correct author receives the credit for their contributions. An ORCID remains the same no matter any changes of name, affiliation, or research area.
All content published with LSE Press is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for online tracking and referencing.
We register our journals and books with as many suitable indexes as possible and can provide advice to editors on how to improve the chances of application to high impact index services. Our journals are indexed in DOAJ, Scopus, Dimensions.ai and Google Scholar.
All of our article metadata are openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and the journals are registered with Open Archives for discovery.
You can find our books for free in OAPEN, DOAB, Google Books and for sale from large bookseller platforms.
Archiving
LSE Press content is CLOCKSS enabled, and copies of all LSE Press publications are made available from LSE Research Online, the School’s open access repository.