Obtaining permission to deposit in Spiral
The College expects you to respect prior agreements with publishers and only to self-archive your paper in Spiral where permitted, unless your paper will be published on immediate open access (paid open access). Before uploading a paper, you must check that you have permission.
On the repository page in Symplectic you will see the Deposit advice with information about the publisher’s posting policy:
Where no information of the publisher’s posting policy is available guidance on requesting permission.
Permissions accordion
- Journal articles and conference papers (accepted from 1 January 2024 in Research Publication Open Access Policy)
- Published journal articles and conference papers (accepted before 1 January 2024)
- Published books or book chapters
- Preprints, unpublished conference papers, working papers
- Reports
- Software, databases and copyright material with commercial potential
The new Research Publications Open Access Policy (RPOAP) allows you to deposit the peer-reviewed author accepted manuscript (AAM) with a CC-BY licence where the publisher has been notified by the College. Please see publisher notified list. If your paper is not on the notified list, you will need to add a rights retention statement on submission. Please contact the Open Access team who can arrange for notification.
If you have your publishing agreement
Check the "rights retained by authors" section. Contact the publisher if information about deposit to an institutional repository is missing or unclear.
If you don't have a copy of the publishing agreement
Check the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher copyright policies and self-archiving database to see what version of your paper you can deposit and if there are any embargo requirement. If you need to request permission from the publisher, you may use the Sample permissions letter.
If you have your publishing agreement
Check the "rights retained by authors" section. Contact the publisher if information about deposit to an institutional repository is missing or unclear.
If you intend to publish your paper in a journal, follow the procedure for published journal articles.
Where no publishing agreement has been signed, you remain the copyright holder of your work and may deposit to Spiral.
If you intend to publish your paper in a journal, check with prospective publishers that depositing to a repository would not be regarded as prior publication. You must also make sure you have permission to include any third-party copyright materials.
If your report was written under contract for a commissioning organisation, the rights retained by the author on completion will be detailed in the contract. Where permission is required, contact the commissioning organisation.
When writing a working paper, check whether you, or your department, should be listed as the copyright holder. The Research Office provides information about the College’s Intellectual Property policy.
Consult the College’s Intellectual Property policy. The commercialisation process is managed within Imperial's Enterprise division. For further information, including an Inventors Guide, please see the Commercialisation pages.
As a general rule, the College does not exert its right to own copyright in work generated by its employees in the course of their employment. However, there is an exception for copyright protected works arising from research such as computer software, databases or other copyright material with commercial potential.