Authors keep full copyright in their work. Publishing here grants the journal only what it needs to review, publish, preserve and disseminate the article — nothing more.
What authors keep
Everything. Copyright remains with the authors for the duration of copyright. Authors may reuse, post and archive their article freely — in repositories, on preprint servers, on their own pages — before and after publication.
What authors grant the journal
A non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish, reproduce, distribute, archive and display the article in all formats and media, and to deposit it with preservation services and indexers. Because the licence is non-exclusive, authors retain every right not expressly granted. On acceptance the article is published under CC-BY 4.0 — see open access & licensing.
What authors warrant
By submitting, the corresponding author confirms — on behalf of all co-authors — that:
- the work is original, the authors' own, and infringes no copyright or other right;
- it has not been published before (a preprint does not count) and is not under consideration elsewhere;
- all persons who qualify as authors are named, all named authors qualify, and all have approved the submission;
- any required ethics approval or consent for research on humans, animals or personal data was obtained and is documented;
- the work contains nothing unlawful or defamatory and breaches no confidentiality or data-protection obligation;
- any use of AI tools in the research or writing is disclosed per the AI-use policy;
- the reproducibility package corresponds to the results reported in the article, and will be kept accurate through review (see data & code availability).
Corrections and the post-publication record
Authors agree that the journal may publish corrections, retractions, expressions of concern or reproducibility notes on the article in line with COPE practice, and that the versioned post-publication record forms part of the scholarly record — see corrections, retractions & versioning.
The formal agreement
These terms are implemented in the author publishing agreement signed at acceptance. The agreement text is governed by Swiss law and will be finalised with legal review before the first acceptance; nothing in it will narrow the author-retained copyright or the open licence stated on this page.