Copyright and author entitlement

1. What happens about copyright?

In accordance with academic and professional protocols, Inderscience cannot accept an article if it is not the author's original work, has been published before (but see our notes regarding conference papers), or is currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. The article must not contain any libellous or unlawful statements or in any way infringe the rights of others. A full statement of our Ethical Guidelines for Authors (PDF) is available. The author must be the owner of the copyright and be entitled to sign the Author Copyright Agreement, if applicable. In submitting an article, the author complies with these conditions.

2. Copyright Guidelines for Open Access (OA) articles

Copyright assignment does not apply to articles designated by authors as Open Access. Authors of Open Access articles are not required to sign the Author Copyright Agreement.

All our journals allow the author of an Open Access (OA) article to retain the copyright in their article. Authors of OA articles retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the article simultaneously made available on repositories under a Creative Commons licence to allow others to freely access and use the OA article without any period of embargo. Information on our OA policies is available here.

Inderscience complies fully with the Open Access requirements of UKRI, Wellcome and NIHR, which state that articles funded by any of these bodies must be published as Open Access. Where required by their funder, authors of OA articles retain the right to distribute their accepted manuscript*, such as via an institutional and/or subject repository (e.g. Europe PMC), under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence for release no later than the date of first online publication.

3. Copyright Guidelines for non-OA articles

If/when a non-OA article is accepted for publication, Author Copyright Agreements should be submitted via the online submission system, along with the final accepted version of the article. Each author must sign a copyright agreement (Author Copyright Agreement) form after reading the Explanatory Notes below. Signatures of all authors may appear on one form or be sent on individual forms. Each form must list the names of all authors of the article under the title of the article at the top of the form, and must reflect the order given in the article. We would expect a "Corresponding Author" to be responsible for the collection and provision of the copyright assignment from each author.

Author Copyright Agreement and Explanatory Notes (PDF)

(Advice on how to add digital signatures can be found here (PDF).)

Inderscience is wholly committed to the highest standards of publishing, founded on rigorous double-blind peer review. In all that we do, we work to ensure the widest possible access to the articles that we publish, to enhance the reputation of the author, the journal, its Editor and Editorial Board, and the value that we add as publisher in both printed and online forms.

In order that we can do this properly and professionally, we ask authors of non-OA articles accepted for publication to sign our Author Copyright Agreement assigning copyright to Inderscience.

The assignment of copyright to the publisher is standard practice in journal publishing. This enables us, as the publisher, to negotiate subsidiary licences to database aggregators and document supply companies, and allows permissions to reproduce articles in books, course packs, electronic reserve or for library loan to be handled efficiently and with sensitivity to changing library and reader needs.

This relieves authors of a time-consuming and costly administrative burden. It also enable us to defend and enforce authors' rights against plagiarism, copyright infringement, unauthorised use and, most important for authors' professional reputation, breach of authors' moral rights.

• What rights do authors retain?
• What happens when the author does not own copyright of the article?
• What are the author's responsibilities?
• What happens if there is more than one author?

Find answers to these questions here (PDF).

For any queries about copyright, please contact copyright@inderscience.com.

4. What is the author entitled to once their article is published, and what are they allowed to do with the published article?

Authors of accepted articles will receive a PDF file of their published article. Hardcopies of journal issues may be purchased at a special price for authors from subs@inderscience.com.

Authors can use their article for non-commercial purposes in these ways:

1. Posting the Author's Original* on the author's personal and departmental webpages, preprint institutional repositories and subject repositories (see more details below†) at any time, without embargo. Preprints should not be modified or enhanced in any way to appear more like the Accepted Manuscript* or the published Version of Record*;


2. Accepted Manuscript
   • Internally sharing the Accepted Manuscript within their research collaboration groups only, at any point after publication
   • Posting the Accepted Manuscript on institutional repositories and/or subject repositories†, subject to an embargo of 12 months after publication (Green Open Access)
   • Posting the Accepted Manuscript on academic social networks or social media, subject to an embargo of 24 months after publication (Green Open Access)
   • Posting the Accepted Manuscript on institutional repositories and/or subject repositories†, immediately after publication if the article was published as Gold Open Access article.
   
   
3. Authors of Open Access articles can post the Version of Record on institutional repositories and/or subject repositories† without any restriction or period of embargo. Authors may post the Version of Record of non-OA articles to a subject-based repository, such as PubMed Central, only in cases where a funding agency providing the grant for the research on which the article is based requires this of the author, upon condition that it shall not be accessible until after six months from Inderscience's publication date. The PDF of the Version of Record should not be posted anywhere else unless it has been published as Open Access;


4. Authors may use the Version of Record in further research and in courses that the author is teaching, after publication;


5. Authors may incorporate the Version of Record content in other works by the author, after publication.

In all cases, acknowledgement in the form of a full citation must be given to the journal as the original source of publication, together with a link to the journal webpage and/or DOI as soon as they are available.

* Versions of a paper are defined as

• Author's Original = Author's manuscript prior to peer review [often called a 'preprint']
• Accepted Manuscript = Accepted version of author's manuscript, accepted for publication, i.e. post-review and pre-typesetting. We recommend retaining this version for future posting.
• Version of Record = Publisher's version of finished article

† For Inderscience's purposes, preprint institutional repositories and/or subject repositories are defined as non-commercial or not-for-profit digital archives of research output which make content available as Open Access under a CC-BY licence. Some examples of such repositories are: ArXiv, ora.ox.ac.uk and Research Square. We would generally class as acceptable any repository listed in this Wikipedia list of preprint repositories.