Open Access Policy

Open Access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles via online. Its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing. However, publishing still has costs that need to be covered – such as proofreading, copy editing, digital presentation and preservation, DOI registration, promotion and dissemination of the work.

We are using a Gold Open Access model. Through this model, the author pays an Article Publication Charge and all articles published in this journal are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. The Article Processing Charges is paid at the time of article acceptance, usually by an author’s research grant or institution or funder. Author(s) can retain copyright of their work, but readers are free to reuse the material (providing proper citations are given), as all the articles of this journal are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.(CC-BY).

Open Access ensures that articles are free at the point of consumption. Rather than charge for access, Open Access publishers apply an initial fee at the time an article is accepted for publication. This fee, known as an Article Processing Charge (APC), covers the costs of the production process. Often this charge will be covered by the authors’ affiliated institution(s), or by the funding body responsible for commissioning the research.

By using a liberal copyright license, Open Access removes barriers and allows researchers to make use of articles in new ways. This includes practices like meta-analysis and text mining, which help reveal trends in science that would not be obvious at the level of individual articles. This open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative's (BOAI) definition of open access.