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Open Access and Digital Scholarship Blog

#lovedata24: interview with yves-alexandre from the computational privacy group.

16 February 2024

  • Research Data
  • Research Data Management

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As part of #LoveData24, the Research Data Management team had a chance to catch up with Yves-Alexandre, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Imperial College London, who also heads the Computational Privacy Group (CPG). The CPG are a young research group at Imperial College London studying the privacy risks arising from large scale behavioural datasets. In this short interview we discussed the interests of the group, the challenges of managing sensitive research data and whether we need to reevaluate what we think we know about anonymisation.

How did you become involved with the Computational Privacy Group (CPG)?

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye (YD) So, my career as a researcher started when I was actually doing my master’s thesis at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. That was in in 2009. This was pre-A.I. and the beginning of the Big Data era. People were extremely excited about the potential for working with large amounts of data to revolutionise the sciences, ranging from social science to psychology, to urban analytics or urban studies and medicine.

So many things suddenly became possible and people were like, ”this is the microscope”, or any other kind of analogy you can think of in terms of this being a true revolution for the scientific process. Some even went as far as saying, “this is the end of theory, right?” or “this spells the end of hypothesis testing. The data are going to basically speak for themselves”.  There was a huge hype of expectation which, as time went on gradually decreased and eventually plateaued to what it is now. It did have a transformative impact on the sciences but to me it became quite obvious working with these data as a student, just how reidentifiable all these types of data potentially were.

Back in the days, we were looking at location data across the country and on the one hand, everyone was talking about how the data were anonymous. As a student, I was working with the data and I could see people moving around on the map, so to speak. And it just blew my mind. It didn’t seem like it would take very much for these data to not be anonymous anymore.

Anonymisation and the way we’ve been using it to protect data have been well documented in the literature. There has also been extensive research on how to properly anonymise data. I think what has taken a bit of time for people to grasp is that anonymisation, in the context of big data, is its own new, different question, and that actually a lot of the techniques that had developed from around 1990 to 2010 were basically not applicable to the world of big data anymore. This is mostly due to two factors. The first one is just the sheer amount of data that is being collected about every single person in any given dataset that we are interested in, from social science to medicine. Combining these with social media and the availability of auxiliary data (meaning data from an external source, such as census data) means that not only are there a lot of data about you in those datasets, but there are also a lot of data about you that can be cross-referenced with sources elsewhere to reidentify you. And I think what took us quite a bit of time to get across to people was that this was a novel and unique issue that had to be addressed. It’s really about big data and the availability of auxiliary data. I think that’s really what led a lot of our research into privacy. Regarding anonymisation, we are interested in the conversation around whether there is still a way to make it work as intended given everything we know or do we need to invent something fundamentally new. If that is the case, what should our contribution to a new method look like?

At the end of the day, I think the main message that we have is that anonymisation is a powerful guarantee because it is basically a type of promise that is made to you that the data are going be used as part of statistical models, et cetera, but they’re never going to be linked back to you.

The challenge lies in the way we go about achieving this in practice. Deidentification techniques and principles such as K-anonymity are (unfortunately) often considered a good way of protecting privacy. These techniques which, basically take a given dataset and modify it in one way or another, might have been considered robust enough when they were invented in the 90s and 2000s, but because of the world we live in today and the amount of data available about every single person in those datasets, they basically fall short.

There is a need for a real paradigm shift in terms of what we are using and there are a lot of good techniques out there. Fundamentally, the question comes down to what is necessary for you to make sure that the promise of anonymisation holds true, now and in the future.

imperial college london research papers

Could you talk to me a little bit about the Observatory of Anonymity and what this project set out to achieve? And then as a second part of that question, are there any new projects that you’re currently working on?

YD: The Observatory of Anonymity comes from a research project published by a former postdoc of mine, and the idea is basically to demonstrate with very specific examples to people, how little it takes to potentially reidentify someone.

Fundamentally, you could spend time trying to write down the math to make sense of why you know for a certain number of reasons that a handful of pieces of information are going to be sufficient in linking back to you. The other option is to look at an actual model of the population of the UK. As a starting point, we know that there are roughly 66 million people living across the country. Even if you take London, there are still 10 million of us. And yet, as you start to focus on a handful of characteristics, you begin to realise very quickly, that those characteristics, when put together, are going to make you stand out and a significant fraction of the time that can mean that you will be the only person in all of the country to match those sets of characteristics.

The interesting part is what do we do?

You’re working within Research Data Management and your team are increasingly dealing with sensitive data and the question of how they can be safely shared? Clearly there are huge benefits to data being shared in science, in terms of verifying research findings and reproducing the results and so on. The question is how do we go about this? What meaningful measures can you put in place to ensure that you sufficiently lower the risks of harmful disclosure in such a way that you know that the benefit of showing these data will clearly outweigh those risks?

I think from our perspective, it’s really about focusing on supporting modern privacy-ensuring approaches that are fit for purpose. We know that there are a range of techniques; from controlled access to query-based systems, to some of the encryption techniques that, depending on the use case, who needs to access your data, and the size of your dataset would allow someone to use your data, run analysis, and replicate your results fully without endangering people’s privacy. For us, it’s about recognising the right combination of those approaches and how we develop some of these tools and test them.

I think there has been a big push towards open data, under the de-identification model, for very good reasons. But this should continue to be informed by considerations around appropriate modern tools, to safeguard data while preserving some utility. Legally at least, you cannot not care about privacy and if you want to care about privacy properly, this will affect the utility. So we need to continue to handle questions around data sharing on a case-by-case basis rather than imply that everything should be fully open all of the time. Otherwise this will be damaging to the sciences and to privacy.

Yes, it is important to acknowledge that that tension between privacy and utility of research data exists and that a careful balance needs to be struck but this may not always be possible to achieve. This is something that we try to communicate in our training and advocacy work within Research Data Management services. We have adopted a message that can hopefully be helpful (and which originated from Horizon Europe [1] ), which states that open science operates on the principle of being ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. In practice this means that results and data may be kept closed if making them open access is against the researcher’s legitimate interests or obligations to personal data protection. This is where a mechanism such as controlled access could play a role.

YD: Just so. I think you guys have quite a unique role to play. A controlled access mechanism that allows a researcher to run some code on someone else’s data without seeing the data on the other hand requires systems of management, authorisation and verification of users, et cetera. This is simply out of the reach of many individual researchers. As a facility or as a form of infrastructure however, this is actually something that isn’t too difficult to provide. I think France has something called the CASD, which is the Center for Secure Access to Data (or Centre d’Accès Sécurisé aux Données) and this is how the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) is able to share a lot of sensitive data. Oxford’s OpenSAFELY in the UK is another great example of this. They are ahead in this regard. We need similar mechanisms when it comes to research data to facilitate replicability, reuse and for validating and verifying results. It is absolutely necessary. But we need proper tools to do this and it’s something that we need to tackle as a collective. No individual researcher can do this alone.

What in your experience are common misconceptions around anonymisation in the context of research data?

YD: I think the most common misunderstanding is a general underestimation of the scale of data already available. Concerns often revolve around a notion of, could someone search another person’s social media and deduce a piece of information to reidentify them in my medical dataset? In the world of big data, I would argue that what we strive to protect against also includes far stronger threat models than this. We had examples in the US in which you had right wing organisations with significant resources buying access to location data, matching them manually, potentially at scale with the travel record, and other pieces of information they could find about clerics to potentially identify them in this dataset, in an attempt to see if anyone was attending a particular seminar [2] .

We had the same with Trump’s tax record. Everyone was searching for the tax record and it turns out that it was available as part of an ’anonymous’ dataset, made available by the IRS and again these were data that were released years and years ago. They remained online and then suddenly they’re an extremely sensitive set of information that you can no longer meaningfully protect.

This goes back to what you were saying again about anticipating how certain techniques could be used in the future to potentially exploit these data.

YD: Actually, on this precise point, we know from cryptography that good cryptographic solutions are actually fully open and that the cryptographic solution is solid. I can describe to you the entire algorithm. I can give you the exact source code. The secrecy is protected by the process but the process itself is fully open. If the security depends on the secrecy of your process, often you’re in trouble, right? And so a good solution actually doesn’t rely on you hiding something, something being secret, or you hoping that someone is not going to figure something out. And I think that this is another very important aspect.

And this perhaps goes back again, to the type of general misunderstandings which sometimes arise where someone might assume that because some data have to be kept private, as you were saying, that the documentation behind the process of ensuring that security also has to be kept private, when in fact you need open community standards that can be scrutinised and that people can build upon and improve. This is very relevant to our work in supporting things like data management plans, which require clear documentation.

We have reached our final question: There is arguably a tendency to focus on data horror stories to communicate the limitations of anonymisation (if applied for example without a proportionate risk-based approach for a research project). Are there positive messages we can promote when it comes to engaging with good or sensible practice more broadly?

YD: In addition to being transparent about developing and following best practices as we have just talked about, I think there needs to be more conversations around infrastructure. To me, it is not about someone coming up with and deploying a better algorithm. We very much need to be part of an infrastructure building community that works together to instill good governance.

There are plenty of examples already in existence. We worked, for example, a lot on a project called Opal which is a great use case of how we can safely share very sensitive data for good. I think OpenSAFELY is another really good case study from Oxford and the CASD in in France as I already mentioned. These case studies offer very pragmatic solutions, but are an order of magnitude better, both from the privacy and the utility side, than any existing legacy solutions that I know of.

[1] https://rea.ec.europa.eu/open-science_en

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/07/21/catholic-official-grindr-reaction/

Useful links:

https://www.casd.eu/en/le-centre-dacces-securise-aux-donnees-casd/gouvernance-et-missions/

https://cpg.doc.ic.ac.uk/

Introduction to research data management

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/support-for-staff/scholarly-communication/research-data-management/introduction-to-research-data-management/

Opal project

https://www.opalproject.org/

https://www.opensafely.org/about/

Open Science – European Commission

https://rea.ec.europa.eu/open-science_en

Read #LoveData24: Interview with Yves-Alexandre from the Computational Privacy Group in full

Open Access Week 2023: Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy

27 October 2023

  • Creative Commons
  • OA Week 2023
  • Open Access
  • Rights Retention

This post was written by Ruth Harrison , Head of Scholarly Communications Management at Imperial College London.

After many years of work, the College will soon be able to announce that we are updating our institutional open access policy to allow researchers to make their peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings available on open access under a CC BY licence at the point of publication with no embargo. This will apply to accepted manuscripts, and enable staff and students to retain their right to reuse the content of those outputs in teaching, research and further sharing of their work.   

I don’t think many people would disagree with the moral and ethical case for open access to research, and that the principles of open research should be more widely applied. This is a global endeavour – in 2022, UNESCO published its recommendation on Open Science stating:  

“By promoting science that is more accessible, inclusive and transparent, open science furthers the right of everyone to share in scientific advancement and its benefits as stated in Article 27.1 of the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights .”  

Open access publishing has existed for more than two decades now, and in the past 10 years, funders have increasingly required open access to the published outputs of research which public money, ultimately, has enabled. In the UK (and internationally) this has resulted in various policies which researchers, libraries and publishers have had to keep track of, and there are now many models through which open access can be achieved. But this also means considerable ‘policy stack’ and confusion, with varying workflows and messaging for researchers to keep up with.   

Introducing a policy through which author rights to their accepted manuscript are retained is a solution to the policy stack. Based on the lead taken by MIT with their open access policy , introduced over a decade ago, and other institutions around the world, within the UK the case has been made that we should adopt the same approach. At Imperial, this began with the introduction of the concept of the UK-SCL – Scholarly Communications Licence – and has now developed into what will be our Research Publications Open Access Policy (RPOAP). Generally such policies are referred to as rights retention policies or strategies, and we will join over 20 other UK universities who have already implemented similar policies, including the universities of Edinburgh , Cambridge , Oxford and Glasgow , as well as Sheffield Hallam , Swansea , Queen’s University Belfast and the N8 institutions .   

How does a rights retention policy work?  

There are some key points to make:  

  • Authors will retain copyright over their work  
  • Under the policy, each author grants the College a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence (effective from acceptance of publication) to make the AAM author accepted manuscript publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence  
  • The right being granted is that of allowing the College to make the accepted manuscript openly available in Spiral without an embargo  
  • The College does not retain the copyright to research outputs – that is waived in favour of academics  
  • The policy applies to peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings
  • There is no restriction on choosing where to publish.  

For the policy to be effectively implemented:  

  • Publishers need to be informed when an institution is going to implement a rights retention policy   
  • On behalf of all staff and students, the College will notify publishers of the policy  
  • There will be a list available of notified publishers.  

What will authors need to do?  

Authors should continue to upload their accepted manuscripts to Symplectic Elements which means for many people, there will be no change in their workflow at acceptance. When an accepted manuscript is received, the Library Services open access team will process it including managing any accompanying APC (article processing charge) application.   

We would recommend that authors:  

  • familiarise themselves with the RPOAP when it is published  
  • consult the list of notified publishers when they are preparing a manuscript for submission – this will be available in the next few weeks  
  • use our publisher agreements search tool to find out if the Library Services has covered the cost of open access publishing for the version of record  
  • upload their accepted manuscripts (or a link to where a copy is already deposited, such as arXiv or another institutional repository) as soon as they can after acceptance  

What’s next?  

When the policy implementation date is agreed by University Management Board, there will be further communications across College, contact information and guidance available online at the Scholarly Communication website . This will include the list of notified publishers, and advice on what to do if your intended publisher is not on that list. And it is not only staff who will be able to take advantage of the policy, students are included as well – if you are a student publishing a journal article or conference paper, you will grant and retain the same rights as outlined above.  

In the spirit of this year’s International Open Access Week theme, Community over Commercialisation , the ultimate question is: who decides? Should publishers get to decide what research readers see and what they can do with it, or should it be for the research community to decide for itself? RPOAP answers the question in favour of the community.  

Read Open Access Week 2023: Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy in full

Introducing a new journal search tool for open access publisher agreements

29 October 2022

Screenshot of journal title search results for search term energy

The tool (powered by SciFree ) is part of our revamped publisher agreements and discounts webpage, which has also been reformatted for ease of navigation as the number of agreements Imperial is part of has grown. A full list of journals with fully covered APCs (.xls) is also available from the webpage to view in an Excel spreadsheet (Imperial members only).

The search tool allows users to see whether titles are included in agreements that fully cover the open access fee, offer a discount, or whether they are not covered but you can apply to the Imperial Open Access Fund (see the three examples below). Each of these icons links to instructions or further information for the relevant option.

Screenshot showing search results table with columns: Journals, Included in agreements, License option, Publishing model

The results also give the default open access license for the journal, and whether it is a fully open access journal, or hybrid (a subscription journal offering an open access option).

Also featured are links to the Directory of Open Access Journals ( DOAJ ), and an embedded version of the Plan S Journal Checker Tool (JCT). Journals listed in DOAJ are eligible for the Imperial Open Access Fund, so if your chosen journal is not part of a publisher agreement, but is listed in DOAJ, you should apply to the Imperial Fund . (Eligibility also requires that you have no access to alternative funding for open access, and that the paper is a research article). The Plan S JCT allows authors with UKRI or Wellcome Trust funding to check their options for meeting their funder’s open access requirements. Contact the open access team at [email protected] if you need any help interpreting the search results.

Screenshot showing link to search DOAJ, and embedded Plan S journal checker search tool

If you want to feed back on whether this search tool was helpful, or access a link to book a one-to-one training session with the open access team, you can use the chat icon at the bottom right of the page. You can also book a training session via our website, or email us at [email protected]

We hope you find this useful!

Read Introducing a new journal search tool for open access publisher agreements in full

The changing state of Gold Open Access at Imperial

28 October 2022

Publisher Agreements  

As was highlighted by Imperial’s Director of Library Services Chris Banks in her blog post earlier in this International Open Access Week 2022 , the past few years have seen a rapid increase in the number of publisher agreements that Imperial College has signed up to. We now have 33 agreements in place that allow for open access (OA) fees to be fully covered for corresponding authors affiliated with imperial College London at no further cost.  

This has unsurprisingly led to a significant increase in the number of papers being made OA through such agreements. The below graph shows the num ber of papers covered over the last year via four of the most used Read & Publish agreements that we currently have:

imperial college london research papers

This adds up to almost 1000 OA papers from these four agreements alone, which does not include the figures from other publishers we have agreements with such as SAGE, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, and Cambridge University Press.

A shift away from individual APC payments?

As was predicted in an earlier blog post from OA Week 2020, the number of papers now being covered through publisher agreements has now overtaken the number of individual Article Processing Charges (APCs) that we pay for from the OA funds that we administer . For the period from 1 October 2021 to 30 September 2022 we paid for a total of 759 APCs, compared to well over 1000 covered through the agreements.

While we have only seen a slight drop in the total number of individual APCs paid for compared to last year, the most significant change has been an ongoing reduction in the number of APCs we have paid for papers in hybrid journals specifically (i.e. subscription journals that have an OA option) as shown in the below graph:

imperial college london research papers

This reduction in individual payments for APCs in hybrid journals should not be attributed to the increase in publisher agreements alone, as changes to funder policies in recent years have also introduced tighter restrictions on hybrid APC payments, and have offered authors alternative routes to compliance via the green OA route through rights retention . However, it is certainly one of the main reasons behind this shift and is a desired outcome in the transition away from a publishing model that allowed for ‘double-dipping’.

Imperial Open Access Fund

As most publisher agreements do not require authors to be funded, they have allowed many papers to be made OA via the gold route that would otherwise not have been eligible. As well as our funder OA block grants, we are also fortunate to be able to offer our authors the Imperial Open Access Fund. This is available for those without alternative funds available, and can be used to pay APCs for original research papers in fully OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals .

Although some of our publisher agreements do cover fully OA as well as hybrid journals (e.g. Wiley’s ), most of them do not, and there are many publishers who exclusively offer fully OA journals with compulsory APCs. This means the Imperial OA Fund continues to have a big part to play in enabling our authors to publish OA and covered 363 APCs in the last year (nearly half of the total amount):

imperial college london research papers

For details on Imperial’s current publisher agreements, please see our newly revamped Publisher agreements and discounts page, and for details on our OA funds and how Imperial authors can apply for APC funding please see our Applying for funding page.

Read The changing state of Gold Open Access at Imperial in full

Springer Nature negotiations

Chris Banks

25 October 2022

  • Publisher negotiations
  • View all tags and categories for Springer Nature negotiations

UK higher education institutions along with Jisc are currently in negotiation for a new “read and publish” agreement (also referred to as “transitional” or “transformative” agreements) with the publisher Springer Nature . Our current agreement runs to the end of December 2022 and we are seeking a new agreement that will not only enable us to read the journals covered by the deal, but also enables researchers to publish open access in those journals at no additional cost.

The sector has agreed criteria for our negotiations. Agreements should

Reduce and constrain costs

Provide full and immediate open access publishing, aid compliance with funder open access requirements, be transparent, fair, and reasonable, deliver improvements in service, workflows, and discovery.

We achieved these aims with last year’s negotiations with Elsevier and are seeking to do so with Springer Nature. In addition to seeking a renewal of the existing Springer Compact agreement which has been running since 2016, we are also seeking to include Nature research journals and Palgrave journals.

If you are reading this and wondering what a “transitional” agreement is, my colleague David Phillips wrote about these in an earlier blog . At the time David noted that we had 11 such agreements in place at Imperial. This has now risen to 33 with fully covered publishing costs plus further agreements which include discounted article processing charges (APCs). Back in 2019, only 9% of sector spend enabled full OA publishing. That figure is now over 80% .

Why are the negotiations criteria important for researchers?

It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the sector criteria and what they mean for academic authors:

  • To be sustainable, the costs of reading and publishing cannot continue rising more than that of inflation. Back at the turn of the century, under 44% of Imperial’s Library Services budget was spent on content. Today it is closer to 60% and further increases are simply not sustainable either for Imperial or for the sector. Our most recent Jisc negotiations  went some way to stem the rise and we need the agreement with Springer Nature to similarly deliver. To illustrate the impact of increasing content prices, the chart below shows the breakdown of expenditure on staff, operations, and content costs.

100% stacked bar chart showing Breakdown of Imperial College Library Expenditure between content, operations and staff 2000 to 2021. In 2000 the cost of content was 45.5% of total budget and in 2021 it was 56.6% having reached 59% in 2020

  • One of the  questions that libraries frequently get asked is what should authors do to both ensure they meet funder obligations, and that their research outputs are eligible for the Research Excellence Framework – the REF. Our agreement with Springer Nature needs to enable both, affordably.
  • As researchers you have secured the grant funding, you have assembled the team, drawn up the protocols, undertaken the research, undertaken the analysis and written up the findings. You then undertake the peer review. All of the above without payment from the publisher. You may also act as editors for journals, often on a voluntary basis with no compensation. Libraries then pay the publisher for publishing and content provision services. We need those payments to be transparent, fair and reasonable, reflecting the contribution researchers already make to the system.
  • We are in a transition from paying for content to paying for publishing services on behalf of researchers. It is really important that those services are efficient for all parties otherwise we simply introduce additional administrative costs into the system. For authors, time spent battling a clunky submissions system or an unclear or conflicting publishing contract, especially processes which involve back and forth with libraries, are taking time away from your research activities as well as adding to admin burdens.
  • It is of course vital that research is discoverable for it to be built on and to have impact.

Negotiations

  • These are ongoing. I’m closely involved as a member of the UUK/Jisc Content Negotiations Strategy Group , as chair of the Jisc Content Expert Group and as a member of the Springer Nature Negotiations Team . Our next negotiations meeting with the publisher is scheduled for 14th November.

Researchers can continue to publish in SN journals and meet both funder OA obligations and have REF eligibility

  • The UKRI Open Access Policy which came into force in April 2022 is accompanied by a FAQ which includes the following statement:
“It is the intention that the UK higher education funding bodies will consider a UKRI open access compliant publication to meet any future national research assessment open access policy without additional action from the author and/or institution”
  • To be sure that your research output both meets funder requirements  and is eligible for the next REF, we advise that you insert the following Rights Assertion Statement on all submitted articles (not just Springer Nature):
“For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising”

If you have questions or want further information

  • See if Imperial’s existing open access webpages and the UKRI Open Access Policy help
  • Contact the OA team
  • Subscribe to the Imperial Open Research Newsletter
  • Invite us along to talk to your research group / department

For other activities during #OAWeek2022 see this post by my colleague John Murtagh.

About me: I am Director of Library Services at Imperial College London. My profile is here and you can find me on twitter @ChrisBanks . I have an ORCiD and you can get yours here

Read Springer Nature negotiations in full

Open Access Week 2022 (24-30 October 2022)

24 October 2022

  • OA Week 2022

This year’s International Open Access Week takes place from 24–30 October, and the theme is Open For Climate Justice . This year’s theme seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

12 Month Highlights

At Imperial College London, we provide advice and guidance on an ever more rapidly changing open access landscape. The last 12 months have seen:

  • the successful results of our REF 2021 submission. A significant proportion of published research was made available on open access as a result of the 2018 REF OA policy to deposit the manuscript within 3 months of acceptance into a repository.
  • the start of a new UKRI open access policy from 1 April 2022 which requires immediate open access, without any embargo, under an open licence which applies to peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022. We created a UKRI Open Access Policy YouTube video to explain the workflow.
  • the start of a new NIHR open access policy from 1 April 2022 which requires immediate open access, without any embargo under, an open licence which applies to peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022
  • for published research that is funded by UKRI, Wellcome Trust, NIHR, and Horizon Europe a new Rights Retention Statement requirement on submissions “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising”
  • the increase to 33 of new publisher agreements and discounts , many of which cover open access fees in full for Imperial corresponding authors. This includes a three-year agreement with Elsevier the largest publisher of Imperial research
  • the Library’s support for several publishing initiatives within Jisc’s open access community framework (OACF) 2022-24 which aims to provide financial support for innovative open access content models
  • our first ever training session for all researchers new to Imperial covering open access and research data management (RDM) 
  • the launch of an open research education for doctoral students webpage that includes a roadmap for open research courses and support

Open Access Week logos with multiple global languages

OA Week 22 Activities

The upcoming Open Access Week will allow us to announce several initiatives and news items relevant to Imperial researchers and the wider community.

They will include the following:

  • daily tweets and Yammer posts highlighting statistics on OA and climate justice related publications held in Spiral using the hashtags #OpenAccessWeek #OAWeek2022 and this year’s theme is #OpenForClimateJustice .
  • the launch of a new journal search tool for open access publisher agreements
  • a revamped publisher agreements and discounts webpage, which has also been reformatted to ease navigation as the number of agreements grows
  • a blog post on Transformative Agreements that we have signed with publishers and includes statistics on the number of papers published 
  • a blog post on UK negotiations with the publisher Springer Nature written by our Director of Library Services, Chris Banks
  • a blog post on the Imperial Open Access Fund and how many publications we support

In the meantime, for open access advice, guidance and updates, email [email protected] or visit the open access website . You can also request a one to one either via Teams or in person, or a training session for your group or team. You can also sign up to the Imperial Open Research Newsletter (requires an Imperial email address), and follow us on Twitter at @OAImperial and Yammer at Open Access publishing – LI .

Read Open Access Week 2022 (24-30 October 2022) in full

Open Access Week 2021 (25–31 October)

28 October 2021

This year’s International Open Access Week takes place 25–31 October, and the theme is It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity .

This theme aligns with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science , which was released in draft in May, and will be put forward for adoption by UNESCO’s General Conference in November. Since it is the first global standard-setting framework on Open Science, it presents an important opportunity to build equity into the foundations of new policies.

Here at Imperial, we continue to provide advice and guidance on an ever more rapidly changing open access landscape. The last 12 months have seen:

  • the REF 2021 submission (the next REF is scheduled for 2027. Please continue to follow the REF 2021 open access policy ),
  • the start of a new Wellcome Trust open access policy from 1 January 2021 ,
  • the announcement of a new UKRI open access policy (to apply to peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022, and monograph, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024. More information will be available in the coming months),
  • the negotiation of new publisher agreements and discounts , many of which cover open access fees in full for Imperial corresponding authors with the relevant publishers.

Our year in statistics (Download statistics are from https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/ ; other statistics are from Imperial College London’s records)

85% of Imperial College research in 2021 is open access.

Pie chart showing breakdown of open access types for 2021. Most is Open Access: In Spiral and/or DOAJ, followed by Likely to be Open Access: In Europe PubMed Central only. 15% is not known to be in an open access source, and small amounts are in arXiv only, and in gold OA journals

The Imperial Open Access Fund for unfunded researchers paid for open access for 367 papers between October 2020 and September 2021.

More than 700 research outputs have been published through Imperial’s transformative agreements with publishers in the last 12 months.

There were 200,000 downloads of COVID-19 publications in Spiral between March 2020 and October 2021.

There are 841 Imperial authored COVID-19 research publications in Spiral ( https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/handle/10044/1/78555 )

The average monthly downloads of publications from Spiral is 175,000 (between October 2020 and September 2021).

The top three most downloaded research outputs from Spiral from October 2020 – September 2021 are:

Stacked bar chart showing downloads of articles, reports, PhD theses, and working papers each month from October 2020 to September 2021. Shows increased working paper downloads in August 2021

Downloads of reports and preprints between January 2017 and September 2021

Stacked bar chart showing downloads of reports and preprints each year from 2017 to 2021. Shows marked increase in report downloads in 2020 and preprints in 2021

There are 19,500 PhD theses available in Spiral.

There were 741,248 Imperial PhD theses downloads between October 2020 and September 2021.

The number of research items in Spiral by output type

Pie chart showing research outputs by type in Spiral. Comprising 52,572 journal articles, 27,389 thesis or dissertation, 5,323 conference papers, and 2,589 other types

For open access advice, guidance and updates, email [email protected] or visit the open access website . You can also request a one to one either via Teams or in person, or a training session for your group or team. You can also sign up to the Imperial Open Research Newsletter (requires an Imperial email address), and follow us on Twitter at @OAImperial and Yammer at Open Access publishing – LI .

Read Open Access Week 2021 (25–31 October) in full

No double dipping! The rise of transformative publisher agreements in the transition to full Open Access

20 October 2020

The impact of Plan S

In 2018 a group of funders and national research agencies launched Plan S , an initiative with the central aim that by January 2021 “…all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.” Implicit in this goal is the intention of funders to move away from supporting the ‘hybrid’ model of publishing, whereby journals offer a paid open access (OA) option for authors to make their paper freely available upon publication but continue to charge a subscription fee for the rest of their content.

As with many other institutions, at Imperial we are recipients of block grants from certain funders, which authors acknowledging support from those funders can use to pay for individual Article Processing Charges (APCs) in both fully OA and hybrid journals. Although we have already introduced some restrictions on when we will pay for hybrid APCs, due to limited funds, with funders increasingly adopting the Plan S Principles authors may be concerned that they will soon be completely prevented from choosing OA publishing options in hybrid journals.

This is where Plan S Principle 8 comes in, which states that “…as a transitional pathway towards full Open Access within a clearly defined timeframe, and only as part of transformative arrangements, Funders may contribute to financially supporting such arrangements”. So, while Plan S funders will no longer support the payment of individual APCs to hybrid journals, institutions are able to redirect OA funds to pay for arrangements with publishers to transition away from the hybrid model towards being fully OA (until the end of 2024).

Read & Publish agreements

There are several types of transformative arrangements, but perhaps the most common are Read & Publish agreements. Instead of institutions (generally via their libraries) paying separately for subscriptions and OA fees for the same journals (aka ‘double-dipping’), Read & Publish agreements combine the costs. This provides those affiliated with the institution access to journal content that is still paywalled, as well as allowing authors to choose the OA option for their publications at no further cost.

As more of the content in hybrid journals becomes free for all to read in the transition to becoming fully OA, the proportion paid for the ‘Read’ part of the deal will decrease, and the proportion paid for the ‘Publish’ part will increase accordingly. While these kinds of arrangements precede the announcement of Plan S, their uptake has undeniably been accelerated by the initiative. Prior to 2020 Imperial had signed up to one Read & Publish agreement (with Springer in 2016), but we now have 11 In place, all negotiated by Jisc for Imperial and other institutions.

imperial college london research papers

Read & Publish agreements can offer an alternative route for authors to publish their work OA in cases where we would normally not be able to provide funding for an APC. Unlike our OA block grants from funders, which only authors acknowledging the relevant funding can use, these agreements can be made available to all Imperial staff and students (usually with the requirement that they are the corresponding author). The process should generally be much quicker and easier for authors, as they do not need to request an invoice or make a separate payment for an APC, and publishers have also been encouraged to improve the workflows and dashboards used by authors and the staff who administer the agreements within institutions.

Not a panacea

However, it can be argued that such agreements do not solve all of the problems that are present in the existing hybrid OA model. To the authors that are eligible for these agreements it may feel that they are getting free and unlimited OA for their work, but there are still high costs involved to sign up for the deals in the first place, and often there are limits on how many papers can be made OA in a year. This has recently been seen with the restrictions introduced to the Wiley agreement , whereby only authors supported by certain funders are currently eligible for inclusion in the agreement due to high levels of demand.

During an OA Week with a theme of “Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion”, it is also important to highlight that such agreements can be seen as perpetuating global inequalities in access to OA publishing, as is argued by Jefferson Pooley on the LSE Impact Blog . A transition away from the hybrid model towards journals being fully OA should benefit everyone wanting to access the outputs of research as a reader. Nevertheless, it is only those authors who are affiliated with institutions wealthy enough to pay for the agreements (predominantly research intensive and in the global North) who are in a position to directly benefit from the OA publishing aspect.

Others who wish to publish OA will continue needing to find alternative routes, such as applying for APC waivers, submitting to OA journals that do not charge APCs, or self-archiving. This is not to say that these other routes are not valid – the option to self-archive (aka ‘green’ OA) is also a key part of the Plan S principles – but for those authors who do not have ready access to APC funds or publisher agreements there is understandably a sense of inequality.

imperial college london research papers

A shift in gold OA at Imperial?

At Imperial we are fortunate to be able to offer our authors a range of different ways to make their research outputs OA, via both the green and gold routes. While the majority of our time (and money) in the gold section of the OA Team is still spent on paying individual APC payments from the funds that we administer (totalling 853 payments from 1 Oct 2019 – 30 Sep 2020), an increasing number of articles are now being made OA through our aforementioned Read & Publish agreements.

imperial college london research papers

The graph above shows the numbers of papers made OA via our four most used agreements (with Springer, Wiley, the Royal Society of Chemistry and SAGE) totalling 567 papers between 1 Oct 2019 – 30 Sep 2020. We also have agreements in place with the Company of Biologists, European Respiratory Society, IOP, IWA, Microbiology Society, Portland Press and Thieme. As previously mentioned, only the Springer agreement was in place prior to 2020, and we are in the process of signing more agreements. We would therefore expect the figures for next year to be even higher, and to perhaps even overtake the number of APCs we pay for individually.

For details on Imperial’s current Read & Publish agreements, as well as other publisher arrangements and discounts available to Imperial authors, please see our Publisher agreements and discounts page .

Read No double dipping! The rise of transformative publisher agreements in the transition to full Open Access in full

Protecting your assets: copyright and licensing advice for online reports, briefing papers and working papers

Philippa Hatch

12 August 2020

In times of crisis it is important that research is shared rapidly but what else should researchers consider before informally publishing their report, briefing paper or working paper on a website, Spiral or a pre-print server?

Will this work become a journal article?

The first thing to consider is whether this informal publication is the final write up of your research or only a staging post on the way to formal publication in a journal. Most publishers accept that the research they receive as a paper may have already been presented in other formats, for example as a conference paper, a pre-print on arXiv  or another preprint server , or a working paper on RePEc or SSRN , and do not reject papers because these earlier versions already exist. However, it is always wise to read the prior publication policies of the key journals in your field to make sure putting your research online now won’t stop you publishing later in your chosen journal. This information is normally included in the ‘for authors’ section of the journal website but if you can’t find this information or you have questions then you can always contact the editorial team.

Which is the best platform?

The first location most researchers think about for an informal publication is a personal or departmental website. This works well when you or your research group have a strong brand and the traffic to these sites is already high, but when you are starting out in your research career it is good to share a platform with others in your university or subject. You can do this by depositing your publication in Spiral , Imperial’s research repository, or a pre-print server in your subject area.

Spiral offers a secure home for your publication, a DOI link that will never break, and usage metrics via Altmetric so you can track who is discussing your work and where. This is useful when you are asked to explain the real-world impact of your research or write an impact statement. Once you have uploaded your publication to Spiral you can link to it from departmental webpages, networking sites and social media sites using a DOI link (e.g. https://doi.org/10.25561/76707 ).

Depositing your work in Spiral also has copyright and licensing advantages because there is just one copy, with one copyright and licensing statement of your choice not multiple copies on multiple platforms all with different licensing options and use licenses.

If you do decide to upload your publication to another platform, read the service’s terms of use and copyright policies so that you are clear about what you are permitted to upload and how others can use your publication once it is publicly available. For comparison, ResearchGate simply hosts what you upload but the pre-print server bioRxiv asks users to choose a Creative Commons Licence for each uploaded paper to make them easier to share and reuse. Both licensing approaches have their advantages and disadvantages so you should pick the platform that works best for you and your research.

Who is the copyright holder?

The authors or the department can be named as the copyright holder. Through the College’s Intellectual Property Policy Imperial has waived its automatic right to copyright in research publication. Therefore it is recommended that copyright should be assigned jointly to the authors and that any alternative is agreed with them when work is commissioned. This approach will avoid a situation whereby authors must request a department’s permission each time they want to reuse and publish extracts from the publication in journal articles. It allows a department to own copyright when a report or paper is the final work and it is more practical for a department to handle reproduction and translation requests.

How do I show ownership?

The next thing to think about is protecting your intellectual property and making sure you get the credit for your work. A myth has grown up that if you can view something on the web then you can reuse it in any way that you like. Make it clear to others this isn’t true by adding a copyright statement like the one below.

© 2020 The Authors. Published by Imperial College Business School

What is the advantage of a Creative Commons Licence?

When you add a Creative Commons licence to your work, you make it clear that it can be copied and redistributed so long as you are acknowledged as the author. If you make something easy to share then more people will do this and your research is more likely to get noticed and discussed.

Creative Commons Licences permit others to copy and share all or part of your work but only on the condition that the original author and source are credited. They are simple for others to read because they are written in plain English and familiar because they are already used in open access journal publishing. An earlier blog post, Your choice! Selecting a Creative Commons Licence , will help you get you understand the pros and cons of the six different licences. This is a sample copyright statement taken from an Imperial report :

© 2020 The Authors. Published by The Grantham Institute for Climate Change under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this example if this report was uploaded to Spiral then anyone reading it should note the Creative Commons Attribution License displayed on the document. The default licence applied to work deposited in Spiral is a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives License. If you apply a more permissive licence to your work (as above) this will override the Spiral default licence

How do I make sure others cite my work?

The best approach is to remove the intellectual effort of creating a citation by providing a suggested citation that they can copy and paste. You can take your inspiration from journals or adapt the example below. This report has a DOI because it was uploaded to Spiral but if your report has no DOI then insert a URL link to the hosting website.

SUGGESTED CITATION Ghafur S, Fontana G, Halligan J, O’Shaughnessy J, Darzi A. NHS data: Maximising its impact on the health and wealth of the United Kingdom. Imperial College London (2020) doi: 10.25561/76409

What if all the content is not yours?

Sometimes you will include text and figures from previously published papers, yours and others, in a new publication. When you do this, you must be confident that your use is covered by: the UK copyright exception Quotation, Criticism & Review , a compatible Creative Commons License or direct permission from the publisher. Publishing agreements, even open access publishing agreements, often still ask authors to give the publisher the exclusive right to publish the paper’s contents.

While citing the source of reproduced text and figures is second nature, copyright, licencing and permission statements are often forgotten, leaving the reader to assume that the copied figure is owned and licensed under the same terms as the new publication. This may not always be the case, especially in a review paper, and may result in another researcher inadvertently reusing the figure without permission in a future paper.

For example, a figure in a paper has a copyright status ‘© 2020 Elsevier. All rights reserved.’ but you reuse it in a new publication which will be licensed under a Creative Commons NonCommercial License. It is important to alert the reader to the fact that the reuse terms of the copied figure are different and that you are unable to provide them with permission to copy and share it along with the original parts of your paper.

A visual representation of the text example in the paragraph above. An all rights reserved figure sits within a Creative Commons Licensed paper

Figures have a commercial value to publishers and the expectation is that the first journal is paid for re-use of a figure by the second journal or that both are members of STM and follow the STM guidelines on reciprocal reuse of figures.

When you make a publication available on the web you become the publisher. This is positive as it puts you in control of copyright and licensing decisions and allows you to license your publication in the way that is best for you and your research. However, it also means that you must take on some of the tasks automatically done by your publisher and that you normally wouldn’t think about. Hopefully this article has shown you that this is not as hard as you might think and that a little bit of knowledge will get you a long way.

Help and support

The Library’s Scholarly Communications team are happy to speak to you about any of the topics mentioned in this blog post. You can contact us via ASK the Library You may also like to read our webpages about Publishing with Spiral . Much of this advice also applies to informally publishing on other platforms. Philippa Hatch Copyright and Licensing Manager, Library Services.

Read Protecting your assets: copyright and licensing advice for online reports, briefing papers and working papers in full

UKRI Open Access Policy Consultation: Imperial College London Response

29 May 2020

  • Consultation

Imperial College London has provided a response to UKRI’s Open Access Review consultation : In addition to signposting the full UKRI consultation documentation and list of questions, consultation on the Imperial College response to the UKRI OA review has been undertaken as follows:

  • Presentation and discussion at the Vice Provost’s Advisory Group for Research
  • Presentations at each of the four Faculty Research Committee meetings
  • Via a recorded online presentation accompanied by a short questionnaire
  • Through information circulated via faculty and departmental mailing lists
  • Via social media including Twitter, and Yammer Responses to multiple choice questions are highlighted The response was submitted by Chris Banks, Assistant Provost (Space) & Director of Library Services on behalf of the College and is available via Spiral , the institutional repository.

Read UKRI Open Access Policy Consultation: Imperial College London Response in full

Environmental Research Group Projects

The Environmental Research Group (ERG) at Imperial College London, is a leading provider of air quality information and research in the UK. ERG is led by Professor Frank Kelly.

ERG combines air pollution science, toxicology and epidemiology to determine the impacts of air pollution on health and the causal factors. We work closely with those responsible for air quality management to support policies and actions to minimise air pollution health effects.

Environment and Health

Air pollution impacts substantially on human health, the environment and economies. Billions of us are exposed to outdoor air pollution on a daily basis, and rapid urbanisation is increasing urban air pollution in major cities, especially in developing countries. The Environmental Research Group (ERG) aims to determine the causal factors and impacts of air pollution on health through a combination of air pollution science, toxicology and epidemiology. The group is one of the leading providers of air quality information and research in its field. Scientific evidence from the ERG’s research informs policy makers in the UK and wider world and includes contributions to the WHO Air Quality Guidelines and review of evidence on health aspects of air pollution’ and ‘health risks of air pollution in Europe’ as a part of the European Commission’s review of their air quality legislation. The ERG carries out a comprehensive programme of research across lung biology, measurement, modelling and science policy. The team aims to understand the mechanisms by which air pollution impacts on human health, with a focus on gaseous pollutants such as ozone and nitrogen dioxide, as well as particle matter from air around vehicle exhaust. Effective measurement of air pollution is a key step facilitating assessment of health effects, targeted development of control polices and feedback on their implementation. The ERG’s work on measurement aims to understand the sources of air pollution, to what extent people are exposed, the impact that this has on their heath, providing the public with information to make choices about their exposure. The ERG is one of the UK's leading providers of detailed dispersion modelling assessments, and urban emissions inventories. The work of the ERG helps establish a strong scientific evidence base with which to inform policymakers on a global scale.

Research Projects

Exposure in london, modelling no2 pollution in the uk, modelling pollution in london, satellite air quality modelling, air quality & climate change, understanding the health impacts of air pollution in london, exposomics project, exhale programme, asthma in london, modelling and mobile app development for sarajevo, global project to reduce health inequalities, personalised health impacts, london underground pm 2.5, breathe london: wearables, liverpool health and economic impact, greater manchester health and economic impact, bristol health and economic impact, birmingham health and economic impact, london health burden of current air pollution.

© Imperial College London, Environmental Research Group. All rights reserved 2020.

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  • Wiley - PMC COVID-19 Collection

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Characteristics of Imperial College London's COVID ‐19 research outputs

Robyn price.

1 Imperial College London, London UK

Yusuf Ozkan

Associated data.

Data collected for this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4269922 .

We identified 651 research outputs on the topic of COVID‐19 in the form of preprint, report, journal article, dataset, and software/code published by Imperial College London authors between January to September 2020. We sought to understand the distribution of outputs over time by output type, peer review status, publisher, and open access status. Search of Scopus, the institutional repositories, Github, and other databases identified relevant research outputs, which were then combined with Unpaywall open access data and manually‐verified associations between preprints and journal articles. Reports were the earliest output to emerge [median: 103 days, interquartile range (IQR): 57.5–129], but journal articles were the most commonly occurring output type over the entire period (60.8%, 396/651). Thirty preprints were identified as connected to a journal article within the set (15.8%, 30/189). A total of 52 publishers were identified, of which 4 publishers account for 59.6% of outputs (388/651). The majority of outputs were available open access through gold, hybrid, or green route (66.1%, 430/651). The presence of exclusively non‐peer reviewed material from January to March suggests that demand could not be met by journals in this period, and the sector supported this with enhanced preprint services for authors. Connections between preprints and published articles suggests that some authors chose to use both dissemination methods and that, as some publishers also serve across both models, traditional distinctions of output types might be changing. The bronze open access cohort brings widespread ‘free’ access but does not ensure true open access.

  • All outputs published by Imperial College London authors on the topic of COVID‐19 between January and March 2020 were preprints, reports, and software/code and all published without peer review.
  • Across the entire period, January to September 2020, the most common output type from Imperial College London was journal articles, representing 60.8% of all outputs.
  • Widespread open access (OA) compliance was observed, with 66.1% of all outputs available as gold, green, or hybrid OA. A further 30.5% of outputs were granted free reading access at the time of reporting under bronze OA. 3.4% of all outputs are closed access.
  • 15.8% of the preprints identified resulted in the publication of a journal article in the same time period, with a median of 60 days between publication of the preprint and the journal article.
  • Fifty‐two publishers were identified across all outputs, of which 4 publishers account for 59.6% of the outputs.

INTRODUCTION

The novel coronavirus (SARS‐CoV‐2), the disease it causes (COVID‐19), and its implications for society have been described as the fastest‐moving production of knowledge in our time (Kupferschmidt,  2020 ) and are estimated to have resulted in tens of thousands of papers produced in a 6‐month period (Teixeira da Silva, Tsigaris, & Erfanmanesh,  2020 ). As a large, research‐intensive science, technology and medicine university with substantial biomedical and public health expertise, Imperial College London researchers began sharing research on the topic in January 2020, when clinical cases of the disease were limited to China. A group formed under the name ‘Imperial College COVID‐19 Response Team’, comprised of staff from Imperial's MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (MRC GIDA) and the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J‐IDEA), led by Professor Neil Ferguson. With a policy to immediately share research before peer review, the group published epidemiological models, co‐publishing through both the institutional open access repository and their institutional website. The earliest dated output from this group was published on 17 January 2020, 13 days before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (World Health Organization,  2020b ). The forecasts of one report (Ferguson et al .,  2020 ) were widely cited as having changed multiple national government responses to the pandemic (Bruce‐Lockhart, Burn‐Murdoch, & Barker,  2020 ) (Landler & Castle,  2020 ) (Boseley,  2020 ). This output received phenomenal media and online attention ( https://www.altmetric.com/details/77704842 ). Many other researchers and groups at Imperial have produced COVID‐19 research in a variety of formats and open access models. We sought to understand the quantity and characteristics of all of Imperial's contributions to COVID‐19 research in order to provide data for the institution to understand its outputs, as well as to provide an institutional cohort perspective to complement the global output level of analysis in other studies on COVID research (Di Girolamo & Meursinge Reynders,  2020 ; Fraser et al .,  2020 ; Helliwell et al .,  2020 ; Shuja, Alanazi, Alasmary, & Alashaikh,  2020 ; Teixeira da Silva et al .,  2020 ). The institution's commitment to ‘ consider the value and impact of all research outputs (including datasets and software) in addition to research publications ’ (SF Dora,  2012 ) as a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment instructed us to consider the widest possible interpretation of research outputs that were still feasible to collect using bibliographic and data search methods; resulting in journal articles, preprints, reports, datasets, and software/code forming the dataset.

We sought to understand the volume and characteristics of the research from Imperial College London on the novel coronavirus in a publication period of 1st January to 30th September 2020. The following research aims were identified:

  • Identify the volume of publications and the distribution over the time period by different research output types.
  • Determine what proportion of preprints went on to be published as journal articles and the average time for this.
  • Identify open access trends.
  • Demonstrate the distribution of outputs between publishers.

This was a cross‐sectional study of Imperial College London‐authored research outputs related to COVID‐19. The data were extracted in October 2020.

Search strategy

The search strategy is described in Supplementary data file  1 ‘Search Strategy’. For all steps, the search terms used are ‘2019‐nCoV’, ‘COVID‐19’, ‘SARS‐CoV‐2’, or ‘coronavirus’.

  • Journal articles collected by search performed on Scopus for terms in Title, Abstract or Keywords, and authorship affiliations to ‘Imperial College London’.
  • Reports collected by search performed on Imperial College London's open access publication repository (Spiral) for terms in Title or Keywords and Type as ‘Report’.
  • Datasets collected by search performed on Imperial Research Data Repository for terms in Title and filtered to ‘datasets’. The same search was performed on Zenodo, Google Dataset Search, Open AIRE, and Datacite Search, with these results manually verified to have Imperial authors.
  • Software/code collected by search performed on Imperial College London Github repository, Imperial College London Software Repository, and MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis Github repository for terms in Title or About field.
  • Preprints collected by search performed on Imperial College London Current Research Information System (CRIS) for terms in Title, Abstract, or Keywords. Standard Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) prefixes for preprint servers were identified and then used to filter preprint materials in the set. 1
  • Preprints were also collected through a search on Dimensions for terms in Title and Abstract; ‘Preprint’ in Publication Type and ‘Imperial College London’ in Research Organization. These results were merged with the CRIS preprint results described in Step 5 and deduplicated.
  • All results (excluding arXiv items and software/code without DOIs) were run through the Unpaywall Simple Query Tool to retrieve open access status.
  • Manual update of open access status for arXiv items and software/code.
  • Results were manually screened by exact or similar title and authorship to identify likely preprint/journal article output relationship.

Software definitions

For the equivalent of publication date, the earliest found date in the repository referring to the release or any documented action on the output was taken as a proxy publication date. Anonymous authorship practices in software communities introduce uncertainty around author or affiliated institution. Outputs identified from non‐institutionally managed repositories were manually verified to have Imperial authors before inclusion. Multiple versions of the same software/code published in the same repository file were considered as one entity, dated to their earliest found version.

Preprint definitions

Multiple versions of the same preprint that shared a common DOI were counted as a single output, but versions with different DOIs or hosted on different servers or repositories were counted as individual outputs. We could not find a systematic way to identify preprints that also existed as journal articles, so we had to identify these connections manually by similarity of title and author composition. We chose to move the contents of the Unpaywall ‘publisher’ field into the ‘journal name’ field for preprints and inputted manually into the ‘publisher’ field the owner of the server, for example, ‘journal name’ becomes ‘medrXiv’ and ‘publisher’ becomes ‘Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory’.

Peer reviewed and no peer reviewed status

Peer review status was interpreted as de facto ‘not peer‐reviewed’ for preprints, reports, datasets, and software/code and de facto ‘peer reviewed’ for journal published articles. Exception: Wellcome Open Research and F1000 outputs were considered individually on the basis of their declared peer review status at time of reporting.

Open access definitions

Open access determination was provided by Unpaywall: closed, bronze, green, hybrid, and gold. Closed access is defined as no access to the relevant output without subscription or log in, including membership log ins for a free item. Bronze access is defined as temporary free access via publishers' websites (to support the global efforts to fight against the pandemic, many publishers provide temporary free access to COVID‐19‐related research outputs). Green open access is defined as items made available by self‐archiving via institutional or subject repositories or preprint servers (excluding preprints published under a CC BY licence). Hybrid open access is defined as an article distributed under CC BY licence in a subscription journal. Gold open access is defined as CC BY (or equivalent distribution for a non‐journal output type) and for an article, in a journal where all content is distributed fully open access (Priem,  2020 ). We chose to exclude bronze access from the broader open access groups of gold, green, and hybrid with respect to the distinction between ‘free’ access and ‘open’ access that encompasses rights to reuse, revise, redistribute, remix, and retain (Costello,  2019 ).

A total of 651 outputs were identified from the search. These included journal articles, preprints, software/code, reports, and datasets. See Table  1 for full details.

Categorization of outputs by type, publisher, and open access status.

Volume of publication by month

Month‐on‐month change in the volume of publication was observed across the period, with some instances of no change: January to February (20% growth, 5 vs. 6), February to March (266.7% growth, 6 vs. 22), March to April (136.3% growth, 22 vs. 52), April to May (155% growth, 52 vs. 130), May to June (no change, 130 vs. 130), June to July (−8.4% decline, 130 vs. 119), July to August (no change, 119 vs. 119), and August to September (−42.8% decline, 119 vs. 68) (Fig.  1 ).

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is LEAP-34-358-g004.jpg

Absolute monthly outputs, all output types.

Days to publication by output type

Assuming the first instance of a publication to be Day 1 (report, 17 January 2020) and the final instance of a publication to be Day 257 (preprint, 30 September 2020), we observed the following distribution of publication dates by output type: software/code (median: 142 days, IQR: 102.5–198.5 days), reports (median: 103 days, IQR: 57.5–129 days), preprints (median: 138 days, IQR: 102–166 days), articles (median: 171.5 days, IQR 136–203.75 days), and datasets (median: 184.5 days, IQR: 95.25–188 days) (Fig.  2 ).

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is LEAP-34-358-g001.jpg

Distribution of publication dates by output type. Day 1 = 17 January 2020 (first publication of an output).

Peer reviewed and non‐peer reviewed outputs

Across the entire time period, identification of output types as peer reviewed (PR) and non‐peer reviewed (NPR) revealed January to March outputs were exclusively NPR, but across the entire time period, the majority of the outputs were PR (60.8%, 396/651).

  • January (NPR 100%, 5/5),
  • February (NPR 100%, 6/6),
  • March (NPR 100%, 22/22),
  • April (NPR 78.8%, 41/52 vs. PR 21.1%, 11/52),
  • May (NPR 45%, 59/130 vs. PR 55%, 71/130),
  • June (NPR 42.3%, 55/130 vs. PR 57.6%, 75/130),
  • July (NPR 23.5%, 28/119 vs. PR 76.4%, 91/119),
  • August (NPR 22.6%, 27/119 vs. PR 77.3%, 92/119),

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is LEAP-34-358-g002.jpg

Monthly distribution of peer reviewed versus non‐peer reviewed publications.

Thirty preprints were identified as later resulting in a journal article publication (15.8%, 30/189). The median time between the preprint publication and the journal article publication was 60 days (IQR: 25–82.25 days) (Fig.  4 ).

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is LEAP-34-358-g005.jpg

Distribution of days between preprint and journal article publication.

Diversity of publishers

A total of 52 publishers were identified across the outputs. The top 10 publishers by volume of outputs are:

  • Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory (medRxiv and bioRxiv) (20.8%, 136/651);
  • Elsevier (18.5%, 121/651);
  • Wiley (11.5%, 75/651);
  • Springer Nature (8.6%, 56/651);
  • Imperial College London (institutional repositories) (4.7%, 31/651);
  • BMJ (4.7%, 31/651);
  • Github (4.3%, 28/651);
  • SAGE (2.7%, 18/651),
  • Cornell University (arXiv) (2.3%, 15/651) and
  • Oxford University Press (2.1%, 14/651).

Of these 52 publishers, 4 account for 59.6% of the outputs (Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory 21%, Elsevier 19%, Wiley 12%, Springer Nature 9%) (Fig.  5 ).

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is LEAP-34-358-g008.jpg

Top 10 publishers by volume of outputs, with output types identified.

Open access status

We identified 66.1% (430/651) of all outputs as open access (gold, hybrid, or green route). The remaining outputs are closed access including bronze (closed access 3.4%, 22/651 and bronze 30.5%, 199/651). In the months January, February, and March, 100% of outputs were published open access, with the introduction of closed‐access outputs from April onwards. Across the entire period, open access items consistently surpass closed‐access publications in monthly output (Fig.  6 ).

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Monthly publication of outputs by open access or closed‐access status.

The following is a breakdown of open access categories by output types:

  • hybrid (journal articles 100%, 70/70);
  • green (datasets 2.2%, 2/90 vs. journal article 21.1%, 19/90 vs. preprint 65.6%, 59/90 vs. software/code 11.1%, 10/90);
  • gold (datasets 2.2%, 6/270 vs. journal articles 35.2%, 95/270 vs. preprints 45.2%, 122/270 vs. reports 10.7%, 29/270 vs. software/code 6.7%, 18/270);
  • closed (journal articles 59.1%, 13/22 vs. preprints 36.4%, 8/22 vs. software/code 4.5%, 1/22);

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Object name is LEAP-34-358-g006.jpg

Distribution of OA status by output type.

Creative Commons licences were observed across journal articles (38%, 152/396), preprints (65%, 122/189), software/code (17%, 5/29), reports (100%, 29/29), and datasets (75%, 6/8). Across all output types, the most popular variation of the Creative Commons licence used was CC BY, the least restrictive Creative Commons licence and used by 151 outputs overall (23%, 151/651). Other open access licences used are broadly permissive: Wiley OpenOnline, Open Government Licence, MIT License, and GNU General Public License (Fig.  8 ). However, for 22.8% (98/430) of the open access outputs (green, gold, and hybrid routes), an open access licence was not identified. This suggests that either a licence existed but, through a data or file error, it could not be found by our searches and Unpaywall, or that an open access licence does not exist for the item.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is LEAP-34-358-g003.jpg

Open access licence breakdown by output type. Note that due to licensing data irregularities, licence does not correspond directly to OA status. Bronze and closed‐access outputs excluded.

Although the majority of outputs over the entire time period were journal articles, the exclusive presence of NPR outputs reports and preprints between January and March, which were not surpassed by PR content until May, suggests that authors needed a faster form of dissemination than journals could offer in the early months of coronavirus pandemic (Kupferschmidt,  2020 ), similar to those working in other global health emergencies (Zhang, Zhao, Sun, Huang, & Glänzel,  2020 ). As authors chose to disseminate research in the preprint form, the sector responded. PubMed Central adapted to include coronavirus preprints ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/nihpreprints/ ), and other existing preprint servers have adapted to prioritize this research or have been established solely for the crisis (Lu Wang et al .,  2020 ). Journal publishers responded to the crisis; a decrease of days between submission and publication by some medical journals publishing on the topic has been observed (Horbach,  2020 ), as well as announcements of reduction of peer review times by publishers (Redhead,  2020 ). However, whether the likely contradictory demands of both reducing peer review and editorial time whilst retaining quality (Kwon,  2020 ) are sustainable or achievable are yet to be evaluated long term. There is some indication that this pressure is changing journal publisher attitudes to preprints, seen by explicit encouragement of preprints on the topic at The New England Journal of Medicine (Rubin, Baden, Morrissey, & Campion,  2020 ), reference to the pandemic as a reason for The Lancet's decision to make their ‘Preprints with the Lancet’ SSRN platform permanent in September 2020 (Kleinert & Horton,  2020 ), and the introduction of a default preprint policy for COVID‐19 submissions at eLife (Eisen, Akhmanova, Behrens, & Weigel,  2020 ). Publication platforms such as Wellcome Open Research and F1000 further disrupt traditional distinctions in the journal and peer review process.

As preprints shift closer to the centre field of established scholarly communications, either the infrastructure and data standards supporting them needs to develop, or bibliographic tools need to adapt to accommodate. The complicated method of preprint data collection in this study (searching through the institution's CRIS records, a search function only available to administrators at the institution, and then supplementing it with a second search on Dimensions) was used because, although some databases index preprints (Europe PMC, Dimensions), contributor affiliation data associated with preprints is not of sufficient quality or sufficiently widespread to enable comprehensive search with verified affiliation. This is not a fault of the databases but perhaps a dependency on structured and parsable metadata from preprint servers that is not always available. Also, a lack of accessible methods through which to search for connected preprints and published journal articles, also perhaps due to missing associated metadata identifiers; prevents large‐scale or automated data collection and requires associations to be identified manually as in this study. This constraint could be possibly prohibiting the rich insight that could come from easily accessible mapping of preprint and article networks.

The presence of 52 publishers found is an indication that authors are served with competitive options from which to choose their own preferred outlet for dissemination and are safeguarded against ‘lock‐in’ from any one provider. Whilst the majority of publishers predominantly serve one output type, e.g. journal publishers to journal articles, some are represented across more than one type – for example, the institutional repository publishing as ‘Imperial College London’ is represented amongst datasets (1), preprints (1), and reports (29). This could be a positive indicator that artificial distinctions in the research life cycle are being replaced with more holistic solutions that offer dissemination for all outputs of research. However, others have raised concern that the representation of commercial publishers across output types poses a threat to equity and value in the research production cycle (Posada & Chen,  2018 ). The acquisition of preprint servers by commercial publishers, Elsevier and SSRN (2016) and Wiley and Authorea Inc. (2018), contributed to their combined preprint and journal article shares in our set (Elsevier 19% and Wiley 12%).

That 100% of papers were published open access in the first 3 months of the pandemic suggests an author preference for this model in this period. However, considering that all of these outputs were not peer reviewed (NPR) types (preprints, reports, and software/code), it is difficult to robustly argue that these outputs were open access as a conscious choice and not a consequence of the NPR output type. There are examples in the full time period of NPR outputs published closed access (the SSRN preprints considered closed due to their membership log in wall and one item of software set to internal view (private) in the Imperial Github repository) across the entire time period, but their presence is small (1.4%, 9/651). Publisher intervention to convert content to bronze open access is positive but has limitations; the access is not ensured in perpetuity and could be revoked in the future (Elsevier,  2020 ), and conditions of rights are not consistently clarified. Areas of particular need in this crisis that free access alone does not ensure are machine access for text and data‐mining purposes, which is needed to apply artificial intelligence and machine‐learning techniques to COVID‐19 research (Shuja et al .,  2020 ) and translation rights to disseminate in a global public health event.

This study of a single institution's outputs was undertaken with an awareness that Imperial is not the largest contributor by publication volume to COVID‐19 research (Hook & Porter,  2020 ) and obviously not the only institution to have produced impactful results. Despite suggestions of the pressures of adapting research practices to accommodate lab closures and the demand for rapid results leading to smaller teams and fewer international collaborative partners in the early months of the pandemic (Fry, Cai, Zhang, & Wagner,  2020 ), we understand that coronavirus research demands collaboration at every level (Apuzzo & Kirkpatrick,  2020 ) and that any institutional‐level analysis should be interpretated in relation to organisation size, mission and resouces.

LIMITATIONS

We recognize the limitations of comparing output types without adjusting for their characteristics or context. For example, comparison of publication times of journal articles and preprints is not a truly fair comparison given the vastly different time enterprises required of each type; neither is to compare the open access models of output types that are mandated for open access (e.g. articles) and the other output types which are not (preprints, datasets, reports, software/code).

The green open access share of the data may underrepresent the true number of articles self‐archived, an action that is mandated by the institution's open access policy. This is because outputs would only be classified green when there is no publisher‐hosted option available (Piwowar et al .,  2018 ), so it is possible that some of the bronze open access items also exist as repository‐archived green open access, but the Unpaywall hierarchy gives authority to the bronze publisher‐hosted version in classification.

Authors were served with options to publish rapidly in non‐peer review form and under open access models throughout the entire period, and from January to March, these options were exclusively used. Across the entire period, however, the most commonly observed output was journal articles. The association of some preprints with journal articles suggests that the status of peer review versus non‐peer review is, for some outputs, not binary. This increasing connectedness between the two can also be seen by the presence of publishers serving across both types. That the majority of outputs were published under some form of open access is positive; however, whether the bronze OA cohort is truly compliant with the long‐term needs of this global challenge (World Health Organization,  2020a ) (Wellcome,  2020 ) is not clear. The inclusion of reports, preprints, datasets and software/code as output types permits a richer and more accurate description of the institution's activities and talents than considering journal articles alone. There is a need for bibliographic methods to adapt to better identify and classify these valuable non‐journal output types.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Both authors declare that they are employees of Imperial College London, UK.

Supporting information

File S1. Supplementary Information.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors received advice from Wayne Peters and Diego Alonso Alvarez, both of Imperial College London, on including datasets and software/code in analysis.

b. The following prefixes were identified: medRxiv and bioRxiv: 10.1101; SSRN: 10.2139; Wellcome Open Research: 10.12688; Research Square: 10.21203; and Authorea: 10.22541. arXiv does not assign DOIs.

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  • 19 October 2022

Imperialism’s long shadow: the UK universities grappling with a colonial past

  • Philip Ball 0

Philip Ball is a science writer in London and former physics editor of Nature .

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In February, the nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley, escaped — in the eyes of some — from ‘cancellation’ at one of London’s most prestigious academic institutions. Huxley, a prominent advocate of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, promoted the racist view that Black people had inferior capabilities compared with white people. A report prepared in November 2021 by a team of faculty members and internal and external advisers at Imperial College London had recommended stripping Huxley’s name from the mathematics and computing department building, and removing his bust from the entrance hall (see go.nature.com/3smu1xf ).

But after extensive consultation, the Imperial administrators decided not to accept the recommendation, and are instead now discussing other options: contextualizing Huxley’s status and views, and adding the name of a scientist associated with the college who is from an under-represented ethnic group to the Huxley Building. The decision was largely an attempt to balance the report’s recommendations with the views expressed by the university community in the consultations that followed its publication.

Not everyone agrees that this is the right move — especially those who have felt the sting of racism in their daily work as researchers. “The purpose of naming a building after someone is to honour that person,” says Rahma Elmahdi, a Black clinician and epidemiologist at Aalborg University and Hillerød Hospital in Copenhagen. Elmahdi, who earned a PhD at Imperial and previously worked there, adds: “I think it is an insult to the Black people who continue to work and study in a building named after a person who was so adamant in questioning their capabilities and equality.”

Whatever the eventual outcome, the fractious debate about how to deal with the cultural and institutional legacies of racism and colonialism will surely continue. The debate was largely catalysed by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. In the United Kingdom, a key initial focus was the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. That action polarized public opinion, with some UK government ministers suggesting that history was being ‘erased’. The arguments became part of the ‘culture wars’ — and British scientific institutions, along with others around the world, have been drawn into them.

Although the US debate has focused largely on systemic racism in the context of slavery and civil rights, the flashpoints in the United Kingdom are imperialism and colonialism, which involved white Europeans exploiting other ethnic groups, especially through the slave trade and oppression of Indigenous people.

Scientific ideas and institutions were intimately connected to that legacy; in London, the capital of the British Empire, that is particularly apparent. Most obviously, Imperial College, an amalgamation of several earlier institutions, founded in 1907 — when the Empire was at its height, covering nearly one-quarter of Earth’s total land area — is named for it. (Some commented on the irony of the Huxley Building being potentially renamed while the institution’s name remained.)

Imperial is one of a handful of UK scientific institutions examining racism in their own histories, and how to acknowledge and redress its legacy. Other institutions and scientific departments around the globe are seeking to recast curricula and address racism’s influence in shaping their fields.

Exclusion in higher education

“If Imperial does not honestly contend with its history of racism, it makes it easy for Black students and staff to continue to feel excluded and othered in their own institution,” says Elmahdi. And it’s not just, or even primarily, about names. “There are a lot of material changes that need to happen — funding, career progression, more opportunities that target previously excluded groups,” she says.

In the wake of BLM, Imperial College decided to remove the Latin motto from displays of the college’s crest, which loosely translates as ‘Science is the empire’s crown jewel and protector.’ When this was announced in 2020, “there was a backlash, and quite a few alumni wrote in expressing their displeasure”, says structural biologist Stephen Curry, Imperial’s assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion, who is white. He attributes some of this to “nervousness on the part of white men that any discussion around changing the status quo is seen as a threat to them. And to some extent, it is, as we have benefited from the established norms for so long.”

Imperial convened the History Group, chaired by chemical engineer Nilay Shah, and brought in historians from University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford, UK, to “examine the history of the College through its links to the British Empire, and to report on the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage”, says the report. Meanwhile, a separate group looked at staff demographics and at the role of factors related to ethnicity in systems for promotions and grievances, as well as in student data, such as admissions, results and subsequent graduate employment.

Rahma Elmahdi talking during the 2018 Imperial College London Black and Minority Ethnic staff network relaunch.

Voices of scientists of colour are often drowned out, says epidemiologist Rahma Elmahdi. Credit: Al McCartney/Imperial College London

The History Group’s report “highlighted contributions of people of colour and women who had been largely ignored”, says Elmahdi. “It helps to show the diversity and breadth of the college’s history.” Among other measures, it recommended that greater recognition be given to former alumni of colour, such as Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam, and to female staff such as Margaret White Fishenden, an engineer who became an assistant professor at Imperial in 1947.

The report says that Huxley’s 1865 essay Emancipation — Black and White “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’ that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today”. For example, Huxley infamously wrote: “The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.” The report argues that such abhorrent beliefs “fall far short of Imperial’s modern values”.

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Collection: Diversity and scientific careers

Like many faculty members at Imperial, Curry didn’t initially see a strong case for removing Huxley’s name and likeness. “Huxley was an abolitionist, pro-women in science, very progressive in his way,” he says. “There are many things to celebrate. But you can’t excuse the racism.” What changed his mind was hearing from Black staff members “about what walking into a building named after Huxley meant for them, and how it impacted their daily experience”.

The views that Huxley expressed “permeate even now”, says Wayne Mitchell, a senior teaching fellow in the department of medicine at Imperial, who is Black. “If you’re venerating someone [with those views], that’s where structural racism comes in — it is intertwined into the building itself.”

Racism and lack of diversity linked

The evidence that racism and its attendant inequalities blight science today as much as they do wider society is irrefutable. “We have fewer than five Black faculty members at Imperial, out of about 1,600,” says Curry. But the wider scientific community is divided on how to confront those issues. Some say that renaming buildings is an irrelevant distraction from the more urgent and important task of improving diversity in the scientific workforce today.

But Elmahdi says that to pretend that the two issues are unrelated is to ignore the very problem: “For people who have a heritage that is from the Empire, and who attend or work in the college today, it’s something that does loom over us.”

Elmahdi suspects that some still feel that Black people and women are under--represented because they’re not good enough. “I know I am not a ‘diversity hire’,” she says, “but in order to explain why such comments are nonsense, we need to understand the [historical] background of institutions like this and why they were selective and exclusive, and how they were built literally through the exploitation of the Empire and the colonies — Imperial in particular.”

Wayne Mitchell addresses delegates from the 2021 and 2022 Imperial As One Media Academy cohorts.

Wayne Mitchell, a teaching fellow at Imperial, says racism from the past is still felt today. Credit: Jo Mieszkoswki

At the same time, today’s students of colour feel a sense of exclusion. Mitchell says that when he interviewed Imperial undergraduates from minority ethnic groups about their experiences at university, Black students kept commenting to the effect that “we know this place was never built with us intended to be here”.

“When you have a Huxley building, it’s like a confirmation of what their understanding is,” he says. Margaret Lawrence, an engagement officer at Imperial who is Black, says her position at an institution whose celebration of its past gives no heed to her own heritage makes her sometimes feel as though “I’m being offered a seat at the table, but I’m getting nothing to eat”.

That situation, Elmahdi says, “is exactly what Huxley was creating when he created his hierarchies — the idea that, if you’re not here, you’re not meant to be”. She feels that retaining Huxley’s name is inappropriate because it pays homage to not only his scientific contributions, but also what he stood for. She thinks that many at Imperial share this view, but that the voices of staff members of colour are often drowned out, or these individuals are hesitant to voice opinions that go against the majority.

Aftershocks

Imperial’s then-president, chemist Alice Gast, supported the History Group report, issuing the statement: “While we cannot change history, we can find ways to clarify what it means, learn lessons from it, and ensure that we are not perpetuating legacies that we find abhorrent.”

Curry, an adviser to the group, was pleased that Imperial “had the guts to come out with this report”, but adds that “we knew that the Huxley thing would light the touchpaper”. Indeed, it did.

Imperial astrophysicist Stephen Warren wrote to British newspaper The Times saying that “I am sorry that [the report] has chosen to judge people from the past by the standards of today … If Huxley is to be cancelled, no one from the past is secure.” And a letter to The Daily Telegraph , another British newspaper, from an international group of academics argued that Huxley was hardly extreme or exceptional in his views. “For his scientific accomplishments, his conviction that all men and women should be judged on their merits, civic mindedness, and the reforming zeal he brought to British science and education, we remain in his debt,” they wrote in January. (Huxley, however, expressed doubts that the intrinsic merits of Black people and of women were equal to those of white men.)

imperial college london research papers

The rise of inequality research: can spanning disciplines help tackle injustice?

Although UCL geneticist Adam Rutherford, author of the 2020 book How to Argue With a Racist , was a signatory of that letter, he supported and participated in the reconsideration of the legacies of geneticists Francis Galton and Ronald A. Fisher and statistician Karl Pearson at UCL. The university elected to remove their names from the Galton Lecture Theatre, Pearson Building and R. A. Fisher Centre for Computational Biology in June 2020. The buildings, which UCL will consider renaming in the future, are now known as Lecture Theatre 115, the North-West Wing and the Centre for Computational Biology, respectively.

Galton more or less created the field of eugenics — the supposed betterment of humanity by suppressing reproduction in people considered of ‘inferior stock’. All three men, says Rutherford, held virulently racist views, even by the standards of their time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Rutherford, who is of dual Anglo-Guyanese Indian heritage, says that UCL’s genetics, evolution and environment department has been particularly proactive in this sphere “precisely because so much of the history of this stuff happened in the department”.

The celebration of men such as Galton troubled evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland while he was a PhD student at UCL in the 1980s. “I really struggled with the unashamed hero worship and glorification of racist eugenicists like Galton and Fisher,” says Laland, who has dual Anglo-Indian heritage and is now at the University of St Andrews, UK. Every day, he entered a UCL building emblazoned with a plaque engraved with ‘Department of Genetics and Eugenics’. “It really upset me. I’d think, ‘Why on Earth has no one removed that?’”

And, he says, when academic conversations about evolution would inevitably sing the praises of Fisher, he found it hard not to feel a personal sting. “In suggesting that mixed-race marriages could lead to the degradation of British society and should be banned, or that the individuals concerned should be sterilized, and describing Asians as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’, it was hard not to think that it was my parents and people like me that Fisher was talking about.”

Rutherford says the genetics department’s decision to review Fisher’s legacy was autonomous and not reactive. “We’re not hiding our past, but we can choose whether to honour people’s names,” he says. “And we can use this as a pivoting point to teach that history.”

The difficult question is where to draw the lines. Rutherford contends that Galton, Pearson and Fisher represent very different cases from Huxley’s. He says that Huxley and Darwin expressed views that were typical of their time — which is not to excuse them, but rather to contextualize them. By contrast, he notes that both Pearson and Fisher were developing scientific ideas that served their political ideologies. “And Galton was an out-and-out racist, in public and private, throughout his life. Pearson was a horror, a racist and antisemite.”

When institutions celebrate the likes of Galton and Pearson, it “sends a clear [chilling] message to people who we should be going out of our way to include in science”, Rutherford says. Having better representation is important not just for diversity and equity, but because it encourages better science. “That seems like a no-brainer.”

Re-examination leads to enrichment

Current discussions across UK institutions about their colonialist pasts mirror similar debates about Germany’s Nazi heritage in the decades after the Second World War and into the twenty-first century. In some cases, such reappraisal deepened, rather than ‘erased’, the historical understanding. For example, accusations that Dutch physicist Peter Debye colluded with the Nazi regime during his pre-war career in Germany led at first to his name being removed from a research institute at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. But it also motivated a deep dive into historical archives and revealed a fuller, more nuanced version of his legacy, and of how many scientists such as Debye, who disliked the Nazis, nonetheless found accommodation under their rule. Far from being ideological revisionism, such investigation can enrich the historical record.

This is what several science-based UK institutions are discovering (see ‘London’s science institutions take stock’). Why should science, generally so keen to acknowledge its potential for revision and impartiality from the role of individuals, have become so fixated on literally writing its past in stone? “When we hold these people in reverence, we don’t do the work of understanding the impact that they had,” says Elmahdi.

London’s science institutions take stock

As science museums in the United Kingdom were considering how to respond to the BLM movement in the summer of 2020, Tilly Blyth, principal curator of the Science Museum in London, says “what struck us was the need for new research. We don’t know very much about how our collections link to imperial history, and we haven’t ever really enquired through that lens. That’s a massive hole in our understanding, and we need to do a lot more work and tell those untold stories.”

The Science Museum withdrew from its displays two objects that belonged to US pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, because they lacked data on their provenance and historical context. The items were displayed simply as “slave whips” and “man-catcher” — “just placed in a case with no explanation”, says Blyth, who is white.

“It was a big decision, but I think the right one given the lack of context,” says Blyth. “We’ve only really started to scratch the surface.”

The Royal Society in London is also reappraising its past, which began in 1660. As such, it often reflects “attitudes and practices of previous centuries that are unacceptable today”, says its head of library and information services, Keith Moore, who is white. “There are past fellows with connections to Empire, the slave trade and slave ownership. There are also past fellows with connections to the abolition of slavery.”

Moore says the society has begun to broaden the diversity of stories that it tells about its history. “I’m very keen to extend our knowledge about the Royal Society’s past activities using independent historians.” The Society currently has two projects under way, led by university researchers, investigating its connections to slavery in Jamaica between 1660 and 1713 and to eugenics from 1860 to 1950.

The Linnaean Society in London — the natural-history society where Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace first presented their theories of evolution — was also conscious of a need to respond to the moment. The society is named after the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whose classification of races is often seen as one of the foundations of scientific racism.

“Linnaeus’s hierarchy, with Black people at the very bottom, stuck,” says Isabelle Charmantier, head of collections at the society, who is white.

The society started reviewing its heritage and collection before the BLM movement began, which accelerated such efforts. Anonymous Indigenous people produced many of the natural-history illustrations in the society’s collection from the colonial era that show Indian and Caribbean flora and fauna, and the society had begun to delve into who the artists were. “It’s a really exciting new area of research,” says Charmantier. “It’s not about replacing or erasing history, but enriching it.”

Joe Cain, a science historian at UCL, who took part in the Galton and Pearson discussions and is multiracial, feels that the best way forward is to make renewal a normal part of how institutions work.

Names that are now contested were put in place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cain says. “It’s no surprise that, 100 years later, people are saying, let’s move on.” He suggests that institutions have regular reviews of their heritage, keep an inventory of the names that get used for buildings and renew them every decade or so. “There are far more people we want to honour than we have real estate for, so let’s just make some room.” That way, he says, those people whose names are displaced would not be seen as ‘losing’ any status. “To let one person dominate forever is too monotonous.”

There is no sign yet of the debate cooling. In late 2020, Oliver Dowden, then the UK culture secretary, threatened to cut the funding of museums that removed statues or artefacts associated with British colonialism. He warned them of “the important cultural role you play for the entire country”, so that “as publicly funded bodies, you should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics”. In May 2021, Dowden blocked the reappointment of Royal Museums Greenwich trustee Aminul Hoque, after the multiculturalism specialist at Goldsmiths, University of London, had prominently called for decolonization of the university’s curriculum.

Such moves can seem calculated to inflame the arguments and generate more heat than light. But they don’t seem to reflect public opinion. A survey conducted by the analytics company YouGov in 2019, for example, showed that nearly 70% of the public supported teaching the role that the British Empire played in colonialism and historical injustice in the United Kingdom’s national curriculum. The country’s National Trust, in defence of efforts to address its historical links to colonialism and slavery at its historic properties across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has said, “As a heritage charity, it’s our responsibility to make sure we are historically accurate and academically robust when we communicate about the places and collections in our care.”

Despite the noise made by ‘culture warriors’ with political agendas, reconsidering the legacies of racism and imperialism in UK science is thus about deepening the understanding of history, not denying it.

The best outcome, says Rutherford, would be not just to teach the valuable science of past thinkers, but also to confront the problematic aspects of their views and the legacies they created: to give the full picture. As Mitchell says, because previously the biases that motivated Huxley’s remarks “weren’t addressed at the source, they have led to repercussions that we are still feeling right now. The narrative needs to be rewritten.”

Nature 610 , 593-596 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03253-y

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Imperial College London

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  • # 13 in Best Global Universities

Imperial College London Summary

imperial college london research papers

Imperial College London is a public institution that was founded in 1907. The university was previously a college of the University of London and became an independent institution in 2007. The science-focused university is made up of multiple campuses located in and around London. The main campus is situated in South Kensington, an area in Central London that is home to other cultural and educational institutions, such as the Natural History Museum. Upward of 15,000 students attend Imperial, and tuition costs are higher for non-European Union students. Housing is guaranteed for first-year undergraduates, and a limited number of rooms are available for returning undergrads. On-campus graduate student housing is available for those studying at the Silwood Park campus, located around 25 miles west of Central London. The university comprises four academic divisions focused on engineering, medicine, natural sciences and business. Imperial's academic calendar contains three terms – autumn, spring and summer – and the primary language of instruction is English. Among the university’s research centers and groups are the Data Science Institute, the Institute of Global Health Innovation and the Centre for Hedge Fund Research. The university’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme each year provides around 400 students with hands-on research opportunities. The university's International Research Opportunities Programme sends Imperial undergraduates to partner universities in different countries – such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. and Seoul National University in South Korea – to conduct research for a minimum of eight weeks during the summer break. Imperial also has a history of research pioneers, including Alexander Fleming, who in 1945 discovered penicillin, an antibiotic that is now commonly used to treat bacterial infections.

Imperial College London Data

Total number of students

Number of international students

Total number of academic staff

Number of international staff

Number of undergraduate degrees awarded

Number of master's degrees awarded

Number of doctoral degrees awarded

Number of research only staff

Number of new undergraduate students

Number of new master's students

Number of new doctoral students

Imperial College London Rankings

Imperial College London is ranked #13 in Best Global Universities. Schools are ranked according to their performance across a set of widely accepted indicators of excellence. Read more about how we rank schools .

  • # 4 in Best Global Universities in Europe
  • # 4 in Best Global Universities in the United Kingdom

Imperial College London Subject Rankings

  • # 37 in Artificial Intelligence
  • # 22 in Biology and Biochemistry
  • # 26 in Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology
  • # 2 in Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems
  • # 48 in Cell Biology
  • # 23 in Chemical Engineering
  • # 36 in Chemistry  (tie)
  • # 54 in Civil Engineering  (tie)
  • # 14 in Clinical Medicine
  • # 33 in Computer Science
  • # 42 in Condensed Matter Physics
  • # 37 in Economics and Business
  • # 36 in Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • # 2 in Endocrinology and Metabolism
  • # 25 in Energy and Fuels
  • # 20 in Engineering
  • # 10 in Environment/Ecology
  • # 15 in Gastroenterology and Hepatology
  • # 41 in Geosciences
  • # 11 in Immunology
  • # 6 in Infectious Diseases
  • # 40 in Materials Science  (tie)
  • # 17 in Mathematics
  • # 20 in Mechanical Engineering
  • # 37 in Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences
  • # 15 in Microbiology
  • # 36 in Molecular Biology and Genetics
  • # 63 in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology  (tie)
  • # 27 in Neuroscience and Behavior
  • # 48 in Oncology
  • # 61 in Optics
  • # 21 in Pharmacology and Toxicology
  • # 53 in Physical Chemistry
  • # 38 in Physics  (tie)
  • # 50 in Plant and Animal Science
  • # 66 in Polymer Science  (tie)
  • # 46 in Psychiatry/Psychology
  • # 6 in Public, Environmental and Occupational Health
  • # 6 in Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging
  • # 28 in Social Sciences and Public Health
  • # 63 in Space Science  (tie)
  • # 14 in Surgery
  • # 29 in Water Resources

2022-2023 Indicator Rankings

Thirteen indicators were used to calculate Imperial College London's overall Best Global Universities rank. Here is a breakdown of how this institution ranked relative to other schools for each indicator.

Global Universities

Global score

Global research reputation

Regional research reputation

Publications

Conferences

Normalized citation impact

Total citations

Number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

International collaboration - relative to country

International collaboration

Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence overall score

Artificial Intelligence publications

Artificial Intelligence conferences

Artificial Intelligence normalized citation impact

Artificial Intelligence total citations

Artificial Intelligence number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Artificial Intelligence percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Artificial Intelligence international collaboration - relative to country

Artificial Intelligence international collaboration

Artificial Intelligence number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Artificial Intelligence percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Biology and Biochemistry

Biology and Biochemistry overall score

Biology and Biochemistry global research reputation

Biology and Biochemistry regional research reputation

Biology and Biochemistry publications

Biology and Biochemistry normalized citation impact

Biology and Biochemistry total citations

Biology and Biochemistry number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Biology and Biochemistry percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Biology and Biochemistry international collaboration - relative to country

Biology and Biochemistry international collaboration

Biology and Biochemistry number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Biology and Biochemistry percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology overall score

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology publications

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology conferences

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology normalized citation impact

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology total citations

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology international collaboration - relative to country

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology international collaboration

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems overall score

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems publications

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems conferences

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems normalized citation impact

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems total citations

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems international collaboration - relative to country

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems international collaboration

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Cell Biology

Cell Biology overall score

Cell Biology publications

Cell Biology conferences

Cell Biology normalized citation impact

Cell Biology total citations

Cell Biology number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Cell Biology percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Cell Biology international collaboration - relative to country

Cell Biology international collaboration

Cell Biology number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Cell Biology percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Chemical Engineering

Chemical Engineering overall score

Chemical Engineering publications

Chemical Engineering conferences

Chemical Engineering normalized citation impact

Chemical Engineering total citations

Chemical Engineering number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Chemical Engineering percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Chemical Engineering international collaboration - relative to country

Chemical Engineering international collaboration

Chemical Engineering number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Chemical Engineering percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Chemistry overall score

Chemistry global research reputation

Chemistry regional research reputation

Chemistry publications

Chemistry normalized citation impact

Chemistry total citations

Chemistry number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Chemistry percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Chemistry international collaboration - relative to country

Chemistry international collaboration

Chemistry number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Chemistry percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Civil Engineering

Civil Engineering overall score

Civil Engineering publications

Civil Engineering conferences

Civil Engineering normalized citation impact

Civil Engineering total citations

Civil Engineering number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Civil Engineering percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Civil Engineering international collaboration - relative to country

Civil Engineering international collaboration

Civil Engineering number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Civil Engineering percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Clinical Medicine

Clinical Medicine overall score

Clinical Medicine global research reputation

Clinical Medicine regional research reputation

Clinical Medicine publications

Clinical Medicine normalized citation impact

Clinical Medicine total citations

Clinical Medicine number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Clinical Medicine percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Clinical Medicine international collaboration - relative to country

Clinical Medicine international collaboration

Clinical Medicine number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Clinical Medicine percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Computer Science

Computer Science overall score

Computer Science global research reputation

Computer Science regional research reputation

Computer Science publications

Computer Science conferences

Computer Science normalized citation impact

Computer Science total citations

Computer Science number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Computer Science percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Computer Science international collaboration - relative to country

Computer Science international collaboration

Computer Science number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Computer Science percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Condensed Matter Physics

Condensed Matter Physics overall score

Condensed Matter Physics publications

Condensed Matter Physics conferences

Condensed Matter Physics normalized citation impact

Condensed Matter Physics total citations

Condensed Matter Physics number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Condensed Matter Physics percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Condensed Matter Physics international collaboration - relative to country

Condensed Matter Physics international collaboration

Condensed Matter Physics number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Condensed Matter Physics percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Economics and Business

Economics and Business overall score

Economics and Business global research reputation

Economics and Business regional research reputation

Economics and Business publications

Economics and Business normalized citation impact

Economics and Business total citations

Economics and Business number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Economics and Business percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Economics and Business international collaboration - relative to country

Economics and Business international collaboration

Economics and Business number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Economics and Business percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Electrical and Electronic Engineering overall score

Electrical and Electronic Engineering publications

Electrical and Electronic Engineering conferences

Electrical and Electronic Engineering normalized citation impact

Electrical and Electronic Engineering total citations

Electrical and Electronic Engineering number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Electrical and Electronic Engineering percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Electrical and Electronic Engineering international collaboration - relative to country

Electrical and Electronic Engineering international collaboration

Electrical and Electronic Engineering number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Electrical and Electronic Engineering percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Endocrinology and Metabolism

Endocrinology and Metabolism overall score

Endocrinology and Metabolism publications

Endocrinology and Metabolism conferences

Endocrinology and Metabolism normalized citation impact

Endocrinology and Metabolism total citations

Endocrinology and Metabolism number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Endocrinology and Metabolism percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Endocrinology and Metabolism international collaboration - relative to country

Endocrinology and Metabolism international collaboration

Endocrinology and Metabolism number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Endocrinology and Metabolism percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Energy and Fuels

Energy and Fuels overall score

Energy and Fuels publications

Energy and Fuels conferences

Energy and Fuels normalized citation impact

Energy and Fuels total citations

Energy and Fuels number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Energy and Fuels percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Energy and Fuels international collaboration - relative to country

Energy and Fuels international collaboration

Energy and Fuels number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Energy and Fuels percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Engineering

Engineering overall score

Engineering global research reputation

Engineering regional research reputation

Engineering publications

Engineering conferences

Engineering normalized citation impact

Engineering total citations

Engineering number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Engineering percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Engineering international collaboration - relative to country

Engineering international collaboration

Engineering number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Engineering percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Environment/Ecology

Environment/Ecology overall score

Environment/Ecology global research reputation

Environment/Ecology regional research reputation

Environment/Ecology publications

Environment/Ecology normalized citation impact

Environment/Ecology total citations

Environment/Ecology number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Environment/Ecology percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Environment/Ecology international collaboration - relative to country

Environment/Ecology international collaboration

Environment/Ecology number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Environment/Ecology percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Gastroenterology and Hepatology overall score

Gastroenterology and Hepatology publications

Gastroenterology and Hepatology conferences

Gastroenterology and Hepatology normalized citation impact

Gastroenterology and Hepatology total citations

Gastroenterology and Hepatology number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Gastroenterology and Hepatology percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Gastroenterology and Hepatology international collaboration - relative to country

Gastroenterology and Hepatology international collaboration

Gastroenterology and Hepatology number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Gastroenterology and Hepatology percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Geosciences

Geosciences overall score

Geosciences global research reputation

Geosciences regional research reputation

Geosciences publications

Geosciences normalized citation impact

Geosciences total citations

Geosciences number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Geosciences percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Geosciences international collaboration - relative to country

Geosciences international collaboration

Geosciences number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Geosciences percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Immunology overall score

Immunology global research reputation

Immunology regional research reputation

Immunology publications

Immunology normalized citation impact

Immunology total citations

Immunology number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Immunology percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Immunology international collaboration - relative to country

Immunology international collaboration

Immunology number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Immunology percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Infectious Diseases

Infectious Diseases overall score

Infectious Diseases publications

Infectious Diseases conferences

Infectious Diseases normalized citation impact

Infectious Diseases total citations

Infectious Diseases number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Infectious Diseases percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Infectious Diseases international collaboration - relative to country

Infectious Diseases international collaboration

Infectious Diseases number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Infectious Diseases percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Materials Science

Materials Science overall score

Materials Science global research reputation

Materials Science regional research reputation

Materials Science publications

Materials Science normalized citation impact

Materials Science total citations

Materials Science number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Materials Science percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Materials Science international collaboration - relative to country

Materials Science international collaboration

Materials Science number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Materials Science percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Mathematics

Mathematics overall score

Mathematics global research reputation

Mathematics regional research reputation

Mathematics publications

Mathematics normalized citation impact

Mathematics total citations

Mathematics number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Mathematics percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Mathematics international collaboration - relative to country

Mathematics international collaboration

Mathematics number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Mathematics percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical Engineering overall score

Mechanical Engineering publications

Mechanical Engineering conferences

Mechanical Engineering normalized citation impact

Mechanical Engineering total citations

Mechanical Engineering number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Mechanical Engineering percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Mechanical Engineering international collaboration - relative to country

Mechanical Engineering international collaboration

Mechanical Engineering number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Mechanical Engineering percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences overall score

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences regional research reputation

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences publications

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences conferences

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences normalized citation impact

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences total citations

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences international collaboration - relative to country

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences international collaboration

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences percentage of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited

Microbiology

Microbiology overall score

Microbiology global research reputation

Microbiology regional research reputation

Microbiology publications

Microbiology normalized citation impact

Microbiology total citations

Microbiology number of publications that are among the 10% most cited

Microbiology percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited

Microbiology international collaboration - relative to country

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ScienceDaily

Advanced brain imaging study hints at how DMT psychedelic alters perception of reality

Scientists have gleaned new insights into how psychedelics alter conscious experience via their action on brain activity.

In a study at Imperial College London, detailed brain imaging data from 20 healthy volunteers revealed how the potent psychedelic compound, DMT (dimethyltryptamine), alters brain function. During the immersive DMT experience there was increased connectivity across the brain, with more communication between different areas and systems. The changes to brain activity were most prominent in areas linked with 'higher level' functions, such as imagination.

DMT is a potent psychedelic found naturally in certain plants and animals. It occurs in trace amounts in the human body and is the major psychoactive compound in ayahuasca -- the psychedelic brew prepared from vines and leaves and used in ceremonies in south and central America.

The study, published in the journal PNAS , is the first to track brain activity before, during and after the DMT experience in such detail.

Dr Chris Timmerman, from the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, and first author on the study, said: "This work is exciting as it provides the most advanced human neuroimaging view of the psychedelic state to-date.

"One increasingly popular view is that much of brain function is concerned with modelling or predicting its environment. Humans have unusually big brains and model an unusually large amount of the world. For example, like with optical illusions, when we're looking at something, some of what we're actually seeing is our brain filling in the blanks based on what we already know. What we have seen with DMT is that activity in highly evolved areas and systems of the brain that encode especially high-level models becomes highly dysregulated under the drug, and this relates to the intense drug 'trip'."

Unlike other classic psychedelics, such as LSD or psilocybin, DMT's effects on the brain are relatively brief, lasting a matter of minutes, rather than hours. DMT can produce intense and immersive altered states of consciousness, with the experience characterised by vivid and bizarre visions, a sense of 'visiting' alternative realities or dimensions, and similarities with near death experiences. But exactly how the compound alters brain function to account for such effects has been unclear.

In the latest study, 20 healthy volunteers were given an injection of the drug while researchers from Imperial's Centre for Psychedelic Research captured detailed imagery of their brains, enabling the team to study how activity changes before, during and after the trip.

Volunteers received a high dose of DMT (20mg, given intravenously), while simultaneously undergoing two types of brain imaging: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). The total psychedelic experience lasted about 20 minutes, and at regular intervals, volunteers provided a rating of the subjective intensity of their experience (on a 1 to 10 scale).

The fMRI scans found changes to activity within and between brain regions in volunteers under the influence of DMT. Effects included increased connectivity across the brain, with more communication between different areas and systems. These phenomena, termed 'network disintegration and desegregation' and increased 'global functional connectivity', align with previous studies with other psychedelics. The changes to activity were most prominent in brain areas linked with 'higher level', human-specific functions, such as imagination.

The researchers highlight that while their study is not the first to image the brain under the influence of psychedelics or the first to show the signatures of brain activity linked to psychedelics, it is the first to combine imaging techniques to study the brain during a highly immersive psychedelic experience. They explain the work provides further evidence of how DMT, and psychedelics more generally, exert their effects by disrupting high level brain systems.

Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, and senior author on the paper (now working at the University of California, San Francisco), commented: "Motivated by, and building on our previous research with psychedelics, the present work combined two complementary methods for imaging the brain imaging. fMRI allowed us to see the whole of the brain, including its deepest structures, and EEG helped us view the brain's fine-grained rhythmic activity.

"Our results revealed that when a volunteer was on DMT there was a marked dysregulation of some of the brain rhythms that would ordinarily be dominant. The brain switched in its mode of functioning to something altogether more anarchic. It will be fascinating to follow-up on these insights in the years to come. Psychedelics are proving to be extremely powerful scientific tools for furthering our understanding of how brain activity relates to conscious experience."

The Imperial team is now exploring how to prolong the peak of the psychedelic experience through continuous infusion with DMT, and some are also advising on a commercially run trial to assess DMT for patients with depression.

The research was funded by a donation from Patrick Vernon, mediated by The Beckley Foundation.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Imperial College London . Original written by Ryan O'Hare. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

  • Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, Sharad Haridas, Fernando E. Rosas, Lisa Luan, Hannes Kettner, Jonny Martell, David Erritzoe, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Carla Pallavicini, Manesh Girn, Andrea Alamia, Robert Leech, David J. Nutt, Robin L. Carhart-Harris. Human brain effects of DMT assessed via EEG-fMRI . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 2023; 120 (13) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2218949120

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  20. Advanced brain imaging study hints at how DMT ...

    FULL STORY Scientists have gleaned new insights into how psychedelics alter conscious experience via their action on brain activity. In a study at Imperial College London, detailed brain...