Copyright Policy

Who owns the copyright

Authors retain copyright in their articles. Publication in BORJSS involves no assignment or transfer of copyright to the journal or its publisher, at any stage.

This is the reverse of the traditional arrangement, in which an author signs copyright over and is then licensed back a limited set of rights. Here you remain the owner and may do anything an owner may do with your own work — republish it, translate it, adapt it, include it in a thesis or a book, or license it to someone else — without asking the journal.

The journal holds copyright only in material it creates itself: the typeset layout of an article, the journal’s own name and branding, editorials and the website. Those are separate from the article content.

What authors grant the journal

On acceptance, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive, irrevocable licence to do the following. Non-exclusive means the same rights remain yours to exercise or grant elsewhere.

• Publish the article, in any format, online;
• Distribute it under the CC BY 4.0 licence the journal applies to all content;
• Deposit it with preservation services and supply it to indexes and aggregators;
• Register a DOI for it and deposit its metadata with Crossref;
• Keep it available permanently, including after any change of publisher or of this website.

The licence is irrevocable because the article, once published under CC BY, has been relied on by readers and cited by others. An author may correct or retract an article under the retraction and correction policy, but cannot withdraw it from the published record.

The publishing agreement

The corresponding author signs a short publishing agreement on acceptance, on behalf of all authors and with their confirmed consent. In signing it, the authors confirm that:

• The work is theirs and is original;
• They are entitled to grant the licence — nobody else holds rights that would prevent it;
• All third-party material is either used with permission or falls within a recognised exception;
• The work does not infringe anyone’s copyright, and contains nothing unlawful or defamatory;
• Everyone listed meets the authorship criteria and has approved the version being published.

The agreement is signed after acceptance, not at submission. Submitting a manuscript commits an author to nothing.

Employers, funders and Crown copyright

Some authors do not personally own the copyright in their own work. Where a contract of employment vests copyright in an employer, or where work carries government or Crown copyright, the licence must be granted by whoever holds the rights.

In those cases the corresponding author should confirm at acceptance who the owner is, and that they have the authority to grant the licence on the owner’s behalf. The published article records the copyright holder accordingly — the employer or funding body rather than the individual — and everything else in this policy is unchanged.

Where a funder requires a specific licence or a rights-retention statement, tell the editorial office at submission. CC BY with retained copyright and no embargo satisfies the requirements of most funders, but a specific wording is easier to accommodate before acceptance than after.

Third-party material

Anything in your manuscript that you did not create is third-party material, and it is the authors’ responsibility to clear it before the article is published.

Attribution alone is not permission. Citing a source correctly satisfies the plagiarism policy; it does not satisfy copyright law where the material is reproduced rather than described.

Obtaining permission

Because the journal publishes under CC BY, permission must cover reuse under an open licence — not merely reproduction in one article. When you write to a rights holder, ask for permission to reproduce the material:

• In an open access article published under CC BY 4.0;
• Worldwide, in all formats, without a time limit;
• Including in translations and adaptations of the article.

Where a rights holder will not grant those terms, the alternatives are to redraw the figure from the underlying data with the source cited, to describe the material rather than reproduce it, or to omit it. The journal cannot publish an item under more restrictive terms than the rest of the article; where an exception is unavoidable, the item carries its own rights line stating that it is excluded from the article’s licence.

Permissions should be obtained before submission and must be produced at acceptance. Requests to rights holders routinely take weeks, and an article is not published while a permission is outstanding.

Moral rights and attribution

Retaining copyright does not exhaust an author’s interest in their work. Independently of ownership, authors have the right to be identified as the authors of the article and to object to derogatory treatment of it. Nothing in the licence waives those rights.

The CC BY licence requires anyone reusing the work to credit the authors, link to the licence, and state whether they made changes. An adaptation must not be presented in a way that suggests the original authors endorse it.

Reusing your own article

As copyright holder you need no permission from the journal to reuse your own work. You may, without asking:

• Deposit the published version in any repository, immediately and with no embargo;
• Include it as a chapter in your thesis or in a book;
• Reuse its text, figures and tables in later work;
• Translate it, or authorise a translation;
• Post it on your own site or a scholarly network;
• Distribute copies for teaching.

The journal asks only that you cite the published version and its DOI, so readers can find the version of record. Where you reuse substantial text in a new manuscript, the disclosure requirements of the plagiarism policy still apply — owning the copyright does not remove the obligation to tell readers what has been published before.

What readers may do

Readers may share, adapt and build on any article, including commercially, provided they credit the authors and the journal, link to the licence and indicate changes. No permission request is necessary and none should be sent — the licence is the permission. The full terms are in the licensing policy.

Infringement

Where an article published here appears to infringe someone’s copyright, write to the editorial office at ceoborjss@gmail.com identifying the article, the material concerned and the rights you hold. The journal investigates under the publication ethics policy, asking the authors to respond. Where infringement is established, the journal publishes a correction removing or replacing the material, or retracts the article where the infringement goes to its substance.

Where someone has used your published article beyond what CC BY allows — most commonly by republishing it without attribution — the right of action is yours, since you hold the copyright. The journal will confirm in writing the licence terms and the date of publication to support you, and will correct the record where the misuse concerns the journal’s own identity.