Everything this journal publishes is open access from the moment of publication: no paywall, no reader registration, no embargo. Authors keep copyright.
The licence — CC-BY 4.0
Accepted articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0). Anyone may copy, redistribute, adapt and build upon the work — including commercially — provided the authors and the article are properly credited. The licence is stated on each published article and embedded in its metadata.
Copyright stays with the authors
Authors retain full copyright. The journal receives only a non-exclusive licence to publish, reproduce, distribute, archive and display the article — the details are on the copyright & author agreement page. Because the licence is non-exclusive, authors are free to post and reuse their article anywhere: an institutional repository, a preprint server, their own site.
Code and data
The reproducibility package that accompanies every article is published under open licences too — by default a permissive open-source licence (MIT or BSD) for code, and CC-BY 4.0 or CC0 for data — unless a documented restriction applies, such as privacy-protected data released as a verifiable surrogate (see data & code availability).
What open means here, concretely
- Free to read: every article, in full, as HTML — no account, no fee.
- Free to reuse: CC-BY 4.0 grants reuse rights up front; nobody needs to ask permission to build on published work.
- Free to re-host: because authors keep copyright and the licence is open, the author — and anyone else — may lawfully mirror the article elsewhere, forever. The work never lives only with us (see archiving & preservation).
- Machine-readable: each article will carry a DOI and structured metadata registered with Crossref, so the licence and the record travel with the paper.
Preprints and prior versions
Posting a preprint — before or during review — is welcome and never counts against a submission. After publication, we encourage linking the preprint to the published version of record.
The funding model behind the openness
Open access here is funded on the author side by a publication fee with need-blind waivers — never by readers. The model, and the rule that payment can never influence an editorial decision, are on the fees & waivers page.