Publishing Prize supporting information

The Leeds Early Career Publishing Prize (ECPP) is an initiative from the University of Leeds. It celebrates early career researchers and supports the prize winners as they explore publishing their doctoral research as a monograph. The ECPP is organised in conjunction with White Rose University Press (WRUP), the open access (OA) press operated jointly by the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York.  

In drafting the submission, authors will have to present an effective proposal for a monograph based on their doctoral research.

A shortlist of up to five prize winners will be selected by a University of Leeds panel.

Prize winners will receive a £250 prize, and have their proposed monograph celebrated at the Early Career Prize event. The prize can also be listed on the prize winners’ academic CV.

Prize winners will see their monograph proposal taken through the full WRUP commissioning process (including peer review), with the WRUP Editorial Board commissioning those monographs which meet their rigorous requirements. Part of the prize will see any publishing fees paid, and commissioned authors will be fully supported through the publishing process.

Monographs are published as open access using a Creative Commons License, making them free to access globally to everyone (further detail below). This maximises the potential reach of the research.

When is submission open? 

The 2025 prize competition is open for submissions from 24 February to 30 September 2025. 

Who is eligible? 

The prize is open to Leeds University doctoral graduates with doctoral degrees awarded since January 2022 and before the submission deadline of 30 September 2025.

Supervisors who think this could be of interest to one or more of their students are encouraged to read further information before sharing this with their students. 

We’d be very pleased to see submissions from authors from underrepresented backgrounds and disciplines. 

We unfortunately cannot accept submissions from those who have already published or have secured agreement to publish work based on their thesis. 

What is needed to apply? 

An application must include: 

• a completed Early Career Publishing Prize application form (DOCX) 
• a sample chapter from the proposed monograph. 

Proposed monographs must work as a stand-alone text-based monograph (not performance or practice based) and must be written in English (though the research contained could have resulted in an assessed thesis in a different language).  

We also welcome proposals that include digital media to enhance the content, such as the use of audio, video, 3D modelling. 

The application must include a recommendation for publication from a relevant academic sponsor. This could be the author’s doctoral supervisor, but could also be an external examiner or other experienced academic peer from their field.

An academic mentor is also needed; this should not be the author’s doctoral supervisor but could be an external examiner or other experienced academic peer from their field. The mentor can also be the academic sponsor providing the recommendation for publication.

What happens after submission closes? 

When submission closes, the entries will be reviewed to check they meet the criteria.

Those that do will be evaluated by a panel from the University of Leeds who will finalise the list of prize winners based on the quality of the proposals and the sample chapters from the proposed monograph.

All those who have submitted a proposal will hear the outcome of their submission.

What happens to the prize winners? 

Prize winners will be invited to a University of Leeds event to celebrate their success and will receive a financial prize of £250. 

The prize-winning proposals will be passed to WRUP who will contact the authors and talk them through the process in detail. This will follow the normal WRUP commissioning and publication process: 

• proposal peer review 
• Editorial Board review of proposal, peer review and author response 
• Editorial Board give decision to commission, ask for revision or reject the proposal. 

If commissioned, the author works up a manuscript based on the commissioned proposal and provides any other content (images, figures and other multimedia content). All publication fees will be paid as part of the prize.  

When the manuscript is ready: 

• manuscript peer review confirms suitability for publication 
• Editorial Board review the manuscript peer reviews, and author response 
• Editorial Board communicate any required work before the signing off the project into production 
• the final manuscript is taken into production and goes through the normal processes (copyediting, typesetting, indexing etc). WRUP will work with the author on the design of the volume and cover, and on marketing. 

The monograph will be released in print and a range of digital formats. Digital versions will be offered freely via the WRUP website. Print copies can also be ordered via the same site. No profit is generated from publication. Publication costs are covered by the University of Leeds, but no royalties are generated. 

There will also be a dedicated monograph launch event at the University of Leeds. 

About White Rose University Press (WRUP) 

WRUP is the University of Leeds’ University Press, publishing across a wide range of academic disciplines. It is a not-for-profit, open access digital publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals and books, run jointly with the Universities of Sheffield and York.  

WRUP is committed to open access dissemination of research and teaching materials, ensuring academic quality and supporting innovation in digital publishing. It works closely with authors during the development and production stages, and in marketing and raising awareness of publications. Monographs are published to a high standard, are indexed in OA indexes and in library catalogues, and are also available through JSTOR. 

What does open access mean? 

Open access (OA) publications are primarily digital and are made available free of charge without the need for user authentication, meaning they can reach a global audience. One of the main benefits of OA is that this content is available to all, regardless of location, status or economic situation. It expands the potential audience beyond those who have access to expensive academic resources, meaning that practitioners and policy makers can be informed by current scholarship. 

Open access publishing ensures the copyright of the material remains with the author.  

It also removes barriers around the sharing and reuse of content, allowing academics to build on research published by others, maximising the value (academic and financial) from research projects. It opens up new opportunities to combine existing findings with new research to expand academic horizons, and enables interdisciplinary collaboration in a new way.

Increasingly, OA is linked to university strategy and policy, with funding bodies encouraging the OA dissemination of the research they fund. OA is also a key REF consideration, with journal content already required to be OA to be admissible to REF, and the strong expectation that the next REF cycle will see this extended to long format publications as well.

WRUP’s OA content is published under Creative Commons Licenses which ensure that copyright remains with authors, who then set the default permissions under which the work can be shared, used and reused. Full attribution is required to accompany all reuse and dissemination.