Research Services: Publishing

Your publishing journey

Our Publishing your research self-study module covers each step of the journal article publishing journey, from pre-submission through to publication.

Much of the information is relevant to other types of research output, including monographs, book chapters, conference proceedings and working papers. Please contact us if you would like guidance on any part of the publishing process.

Authors and contributors

Our Authorship, Contribution and Publishing site provides guidance and best practice for constructive conversations with your collaborators, including: 

• Who should have authorship, and who should be acknowledged as a contributor?
• How can you record the roles of all contributors?
• What responsibilities does the corresponding author have?
• What happens if there are authorship disputes?

Supplementary information and underlying datasets

You can share underpinning data in addition to the Supplementary Information allowed by many journals. You may have restrictions on how to share your data openly, for example if it contains personal data that cannot be robustly anonymised, or if it contains commercially sensitive information.

It is good practice (and a requirement of some funders) to include a data access statement in your manuscript, even if your underpinning data are not openly available. It is recommended that you store datasets in disciplinary data repositories if at all possible, however you can also deposit in our institutional repository. For datasets in our institutional repository, you can request a DOI for the dataset underlying your research publication before you submit your manuscript and include the details in your data access statement. 

Open Access, copyright and seeking permissions

Our Open Access & Institutional Repository pages will guide you through the routes to open access for journal articles and books, including university, funder and REF2029 requirements.

Our Copyright for Researchers page provides information on your copyright, Creative Commons licences and seeking copyright permissions.

Planning for third party copyright applies when the rights to content (for example, images, maps, figures or long text extracts) that you would like to include in your publication do not belong to you.  You will need to seek permission from the copyright holder to include their material.

Find out more in our Obtaining permissions for reusing content from journal articles guide.

Publishing your thesis

Find everything you need to know about your University of Southampton PhD thesis, including copyright considerations and reusing your own work, in our suite of Theses pages.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and publishing 

AI is increasingly being embedded throughout the publishing workflow. Although this has raised some concerns (for example research paper mills using generative AI to write papers, peer reviewers using ChatGPT to review), there are benefits to other appropriate and ethical practices. 

AI tools used by publishers can help detect plagiarism, match papers with reviewers, and automate production tasks. An example is the AI tool launched by Springer Nature in January 2025.  

Individual publishers will have guidance on how AI can be used by authors in the creation of work, and during the peer review process

Some publishers offer free or paid AI services to authors, including AI generated article summaries. As always, we advise you to critically evaluate add-on services to determine if they will add benefit to your work.