UCL Press is the open access publishing house of University College London and the UK's first fully open access university press. Launched in June 2015, it was built around a simple premise: research funded for the public good should be free to read. A decade on, the press has published more than 380 scholarly monographs, a growing textbook program, and around 15 peer-reviewed journals - and its books alone have been downloaded over 19.5 million times across 242 countries and territories.

For journal authors, the headline is cost: most UCL Press journals are diamond open access, meaning neither readers nor authors pay. Articles are published under Creative Commons licences (typically CC BY) and are free to read from day one. This guide covers the journal portfolio, how the diamond OA model works, peer review, and the submission workflow.

UCL Press journals are concentrated in the humanities, social sciences, education, and law, with one pioneering multidisciplinary environment title. Use the table below to find a likely home for your manuscript.

• ~15 open access journals, most of them diamond OA, spanning education, archaeology, history, law, social pedagogy, film education, area studies, and the environment.
• 380+ open access monographs and edited collections, free to download in PDF and other digital formats, with print editions sold at cost-recovery prices.
• Open access textbooks, a newer program providing free digital course texts.

The portfolio is multidisciplinary but strongest in the humanities and social sciences, reflecting UCL's research base. The most-downloaded title, How the World Changed Social Media, has passed 930,000 downloads since 2016 - a useful signal of the reach OA publishing can deliver.

UCL Press is 100% open access - there is no subscription content and no paywalled route.

Licences are Creative Commons, most commonly CC BY, which permits reuse with attribution. Because most titles charge nothing, there is no waiver program to navigate and no transformative agreement needed - authors anywhere in the world publish free of charge.

• Default model: double-anonymized peer review at most UCL Press journals - reviewers and authors are not identified to each other.
• Open peer review: UCL Open Environment publishes preprints on submission and runs a fully open review process, with reviewer reports published alongside articles.
• Books: proposals and manuscripts are peer reviewed through the press's editorial committee processes, overseen by UCL academics.
• Turnaround: editorial teams are smaller than at large commercial publishers, so decision times vary by title; check the individual journal's guidance for current expectations.

1. Pick the journal. Browse the portfolio at uclpress.co.uk and read each title's aims and scope.
2. Read the author guidelines. Requirements differ by journal; many HSS titles use the Chicago Manual of Style (Notes-Bibliography), while others use Harvard - check before formatting.
3. Prepare your manuscript. Most journals accept Word, RTF, or Open Office files with an abstract (max ~250 words) and keywords. SciSpace templates can help you match the target format.
4. Submit via the journal's platform. UCL Press journals use JAMS (ucl.jams.pub), the editorial platform UCL Press adopted from MDPI, and journal content is hosted on the UCL Press journals site with discovery support via ScienceOpen. Register an author profile, then upload through the journal's submission page.
5. Respond to review. Revisions and decisions are handled inside the submission system.

UCL Press is a member of OASPA (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) and a member of the Association of University Presses. Its journals state that they follow the COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, and journal-level policies cover authorship, competing interests, corrections, and retractions. As a university press owned by UCL, its governance runs through UCL's academic structures rather than commercial shareholders.