Managing publications on Symplectic Elements

If you are employed by the University on a research contract, your Symplectic Elements account will have been automatically created, and you can log in to Symplectic Elements using your Oxford SSO.

Other researchers requiring an account (e.g. college-only staff or DPhil students) can apply via the Symplectic Help Desk’s online form. 

There are a few initial steps take to make sure your account stays up-to-date.

1. Update your profile

   This will update your information in the internal Research@Oxford database. To update your profile, click the person icon in the left-hand sidebar, then click ‘Edit mode’ at the top. For more details, see the user guide ‘Edit your profile’.

2. Connect to your ORCID (and other author identifiers)

   Symplectic Elements is able to search various online databases to either suggest or automatically claim publications for you using your unique author identifiers such as your ORCID or Scopus ID. See our quick guide for linking your ORCID to your Symplectic account. 

   You can ask Symplectic to ‘auto-suggest’ publications, which be queued under the ‘Pending’ tab on your Homepage, and you can manually claim them and add them to your list of publications. If you ask the system to ‘auto-claim’, they will automatically be added to your list of publications. In order to set your own preferences, click on the hamburger icon in the top-left corner of your Homepage, and under the Settings menu select Automatic Claiming. You can then set your preferences for each ID type.

3. Add your publications to-date.

You can add existing publications to your Symplectic Elements account, and the details will automatically feed through to your Faculty webpage. 

It’s particularly important that you add any outputs that have been published since 1 January 2021, in case they are needed for the current REF assessment.

Guide to How to Claim or Manually Enter a Publication in Symplectic Elements

Our quick guidance document for adding publications into Symplectic linked above shows both how to manually input data and how to ‘claim’ publications which Symplectic has identified as potentially being yours through its automated online searches.

If you encounter difficulties, please do let the research support team know as we’d be happy to help with this process. You can email lawsymp@law.ox.ac.uk with the full citation details and publication type (book, chapter, etc.). For journal articles, we will also require the date of acceptance.

For open access and REF purposes, researchers are required to make their journal articles and published conference papers open access.

This section focuses on the REF requirements only, but please be aware that if your research is funded by an external funder, you may also have to meet additional open access requirements they set for publications arising from your project. For a summary of the requirements and advice on open data from some of Oxford's main sponsors, please see the list maintained on the Research Data Oxford website.

The University recommends the following procedure for ensuring that your journal articles meet the REF open access requirements:

1. Check whether your article has already been made open access by the publisher (‘gold open access’). This must meet both the following requirements:

   1. it is made open access online immediately after publication without a waiting period

   2. It has an open license (e.g. CC BY or similar). Please note that ‘free access’ does not necessarily equate to ‘open access’ in the REF sense: open access allows permanent, unrestricted access and reuse of research, while free access generally provides temporary access without the same reuse rights.

      If the publication meets both these criteria, your article is REF compliant and you don’t need to deposit your article in Symplectic or take any other further action.

2. If your article is not made open access immediately by the publisher, or you are at all unsure, then please deposit it via Symplectic: 

   In order to be REF compliant, you must deposit articles within 3 months of publication. (This is a change from the pre-January 2026 rules, which required deposit within 3 months of acceptance.)

   You should deposit your ‘Author Accepted Manuscript’ – the final text of your article after peer review that the journal has accepted, but without the publisher’s formatting.

   See our step-by-step guide to depositing articles in Symplectic.

   If you encounter difficulties, please do let the Research Support team know as we’d be happy to help with this process. You will need to send a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript, and the date on which the article was accepted by the journal, to lawsymp@law.ox.ac.uk