Open Access Policy

By “open access”, we mean the condition where the copyright holder of a scholarly work grants usage rights to others using an open license (Creative Commons or equivalent), allowing for immediate free access to the work and permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose (Budapest Open Access Initiative).

According to Budapest Open Access Initiative, making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers.

In terms of the Sherpa/Romeo colour scheme, this is a blue journal which means that the readers/authors can archive post-print (i.e., final draft post-refereeing) or the publisher's version/PDF. 

“SHERPA RoMEO is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis. RoMEO is a Jisc service and has collaborative relationships with many international partners, who contribute time and effort to developing and maintaining the service”.

All articles are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)  International License.