Spiral is Imperial’s open access research repository and holds over 68,000 items. As well as being a place for authors to upload journal articles and monographs; it can also be a home for any research that is not intended for journal publication, or research that authors wish to share more rapidly than journal publishing, or preprint platforms allow.

Spiral performs no peer review. It is a platform to quickly publish research that authors consider appropriate to share without peer review or to share research ahead of peer review performed by a journal. Authors may also wish to consider using a preprint server. 

These types of documents are mostly reports, briefing papers or working papers. They present some original research, data or expert opinion to be shared with readers. Some examples include:

Benefits of Spiral

• Publications deposited to Spiral are made permanently available online, with no log in or access barriers
• A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be assigned, this is a permanent and identifiable URL that is widely used across academic publishing. The DOI makes it easier for readers to find the publication online
• With a DOI the publication and citations to it are more likely to be counted by services such as Google Scholar
• Authors will receive credit for the work in their Imperial Symplectic profile, as well as external profiles like ORCiD and Google Scholar
• Impact metrics including the download numbers and reports from Altmetric, a service that identifies online attention to academic works, are available