Licensing Policy

Standard recommended licence for open-access articles: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) available to authors on request. Whichever licence is applied, the journal website, each article (HTML and PDF) and the deposited metadata must state that licence by its full name and URL, consistently.

Standard Licence

Open-access articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), unless a different licence is explicitly stated on the article for a lawful and documented reason. The licence is applied to the Version of Record and to every earlier version made available by the publisher, is irrevocable, and permits use, sharing and redistribution in any medium or format for the purposes and on the conditions set out in the licence deed and legal code. The licence cannot be narrowed after publication; any change to the standard licence applies only to articles published on or after the effective date stated on the journal website.

Licence Options for Funder Compliance

Authors whose funder, employer or national policy requires publication under a Creative Commons Attribution licence may elect to publish under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). No additional charge is made for this option. Authors must indicate the required licence at submission or, at the latest, on acceptance; the licence selected is recorded in the Licence to Publish agreement and in the article metadata. Where required by a funder’s rights-retention policy, the publisher acknowledges that a prior CC BY licence may apply to the Accepted Manuscript.

Attribution Requirements

Reuse should, where reasonably possible, identify the author(s), article title, journal, publication year, DOI or persistent link, and licence, and should indicate whether modifications were made. Attribution should follow the format recommended by Creative Commons, for example: “[Author(s)], ‘[Article title]’, [Journal], [Year], https://doi.org/[DOI], licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.” Where the reuser has modified the material (where permitted), the modification must be described and must not imply endorsement by the authors or the journal.

No Additional Restrictions

The publisher will not add legal or technological restrictions that contradict the applicable Creative Commons licence. Statutory exceptions and limitations to copyright remain unaffected.

Third-Party Content

Some figures, photographs, datasets, excerpts, trademarks, or other third-party content may be excluded from the article’s Creative Commons licence. Such material must be labelled with its separate rights status. Users are responsible for obtaining permission for reuse when required. The exclusion must be stated in the figure legend, table footnote or acknowledgements and, where practical, in the article-level licence metadata. Journal and publisher names, logos and trademarks are not covered by the article licence.

Author Choice or Exceptions

If a journal permits authors to select from multiple open licences, available options and any effect on reuse must be stated before publication. Any exception should be documented and must not result in contradictory copyright and licence statements. The licence actually applied is displayed on the article and deposited in Crossref metadata; the article page must not display more than one licence for the same content.

Licence Display and Machine-Readable Metadata

The applicable licence is displayed on every article in a standard location: on the HTML abstract and full-text page, on the first page or footer of the PDF, and in the article’s Crossref metadata (licence URI and start date) and OAI-PMH/DOAJ metadata feeds. The journal website carries a Licensing statement that matches this Policy. Licence statements are provided in human-readable form and, where the platform permits, embedded as machine-readable markup so that indexing services, aggregators and text-mining tools can determine reuse rights automatically.

Licence for Metadata

Bibliographic metadata for all articles, including titles, author names and affiliations, abstracts, keywords and reference lists, is released under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication to support indexing, citation analysis and discovery services.

Supplementary Material, Data and Code

Supplementary files hosted by the journal are published under the same licence as the article unless a different licence is stated on the file. Datasets and software deposited in external repositories carry the licence stated by that repository; the journal recommends CC0 or CC BY for data and an OSI-approved open licence for code, as described in the Research Data and Code Policy.

Text and Data Mining

Users may carry out text and data mining of open-access articles for any purpose permitted by the applicable licence and by law. The publisher will not impose technical measures that prevent lawful machine access to content and will provide bulk or API access to metadata on reasonable request.

Effect of Corrections and Retractions

The Creative Commons licence remains in force when an article is corrected or retracted. Retracted articles remain accessible with a clear retraction notice as described in the Corrections and Retractions Policy; the licence does not permit the publisher or the authors to demand removal of lawfully made copies.

Policy Review

This Policy is reviewed at least annually and whenever Creative Commons, funder or indexing requirements change. The version number and date of last revision are displayed on the journal website.