All publications of HUP undergo a rigorous peer-review process before publication decision is made. All journal proposals and book manuscripts are sent for external peer review to at least two independent experts selected by HUP editorial team.
See here for more information on our peer-review policies.
A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All journal articles and book manuscripts submitted to Helsinki University Press are automatically screened for similarity issues by the Similarity Check system provided by Crossref. This system compares incoming submissions to a large database of academic content, and alerts editors to any possible overlaps between previous publications.
All our content is released under a Creative Commons license. We recommend our journals to use CC BY 4.0, as recommended by Plan S. For book authors/editors, we recommend using CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which prohibits commercial use of the material but allows sharing and copying the work, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Nevertheless, we support publishing under any CC licence as per authors'/editors' request.
Publication ethics
The Press and its academic board as well as all editorial teams (book series and journals) have access to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, and editors and editorial boards receive ethical guidance and undertake professional networking. All HUP’s journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice, and include their own statements on Competing Interests; Funding and Ethics; Corrections and Retractions; Misconduct and Complaints.
Editorial teams and academic boards working with book projects are asked to adhere to best practices for ethical editing and peer review procedures along the lines of Cope Ethics toolkit for a successful editorial office.
HUP instructs peer reviewers to inform any possible conflicts of interest that the Press should know during the review process. If a consulted expert has a conflict of interest related to the content or author(s) of a manuscript or is in other ways involved with the matter, reviewers are asked to contact the Press, and more suitable reviewer will be selected instead.
Correction Policy
With strict editorial policies and two separate proofing rounds with editors/authors, HUP aims to ensure that there are no mistakes left in final publications. Nevertheless, despite all efforts, at times published works may need corrections. In general, HUP does not correct minor or insignificant typos or small errors. More serious errors and issues concerning publishing ethics or copyright matters, etc. will be considered. Possible amendments, publisher's notes, corrections, retractions/withdrawals are handled according to the recommendations of the Committee of Publication Ethics.
We strongly recommend that all editors, reviewers, and authors register an account with Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID). Registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier for the account that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published papers, ensuring that the correct author receives the correct credit for their work. As the ORCID remains the same throughout the lifetime of the account, changes of name, affiliation, or research area do not affect the discoverability of an author's past work and aid correspondence with colleagues.
All HUP’s publications are indexed with Crossref and have 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. All of our article metadata is openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and the journals are registered with Open Archives.
HUP focuses on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. Book and journal contents are also archived around the world to ensure long-term availability. HUP’s books are additionally available via Google Books, JSTOR, and OAPEN. Individual journal’s index listings are available on each journal’s website.
Helsinki University Press is a member of the Association of European University Presses (AEUP), Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Additionally, the Press is listed as an official publication channel in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, in the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator, and in the Finnish Publication Forum.
As members 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 all Helsinki University Press content will always be made available as open access.
We fully support and encourage author self-archiving of all content (sometimes termed 'green' open access). We allow immediate self-archiving of all content. We register all of our journals with SHERPA/RoMEO to ensure that the license terms and self-archiving policies of the journals are 100 per cent clear.
HUP uses open, non-proprietary standards for all of its content, meaning that it can be easily transferred to archives and other publishers. All of our article XML is compliant with the Journal Archiving Tag Suite (JATS) schema.
HUP does not seek to possess journals’ or books’ content, and in our contracts with societies the authors retain copyright to their work. If a society decides to change the publisher, all journal and book series content can be transferred from our platform. We endorse and adhere to the NISO Transfer Code of Practice, which ensures that a transfer process occurs with minimum disruption and that the journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers during the transfer between publishing parties.