Licensing Policy

The licence

All articles published in BORJSS are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). The licence applies from the moment of publication, worldwide, for the full duration of copyright, and cannot be revoked.

Copyright remains with the authors — the licence is granted by them, not by the journal. See the copyright policy.

CC BY is the least restrictive of the Creative Commons licences short of public domain dedication, and is the licence required or recommended by DOAJ, Plan S and most major research funders.

What the licence permits

Anyone may do all of the following, for any purpose including a commercial one, without seeking permission:

No request to the journal is needed for any of this, and none should be sent. The licence is the permission.

The conditions

CC BY imposes three conditions, and no others.

1. Attribution. Credit the authors and the source, in a reasonable manner given the medium.
2. Link to the licence. Provide a link to the CC BY 4.0 terms.
3. Indicate changes. State whether you modified the material, and do not imply the original authors endorse your use.

The licence adds no further restrictions. You may not impose any of your own on downstream users — for instance by republishing an article behind a paywall or under a more restrictive licence — and you may not apply technological measures that prevent others exercising these same rights.

How to attribute

For a citation in an academic work, a standard reference to the published version including the DOI is sufficient attribution.

Where you reproduce or adapt material — a figure in a report, a republished full text, a translation — a fuller credit line is expected. The pattern that satisfies the licence is:

Include a working link to the licence at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Where the medium makes a full credit line impractical, the licence asks for what is reasonable in the circumstances — a caption naming the authors and linking to the article satisfies it.

Why CC BY and not a stricter licence

Authors sometimes ask for a NonCommercial (NC) or NoDerivatives (ND) variant. The journal publishes everything under CC BY, for reasons worth stating plainly.

• NC is unclear in practice. “Commercial” has no settled definition. It plausibly blocks a private training provider, a newspaper, an NGO with commercial arms, and some university teaching — uses most authors want to permit. The ambiguity deters legitimate reuse without preventing the uses authors actually object to.
• ND blocks translation. A NoDerivatives licence prevents translating the article, which for a journal publishing research relevant across South Asia would remove one of the main routes by which the work reaches the people it concerns.
• Both fail funder and DOAJ requirements. NC and ND variants do not satisfy Plan S, and complicate DOAJ evaluation.
• Misuse is not what a licence prevents. Plagiarism, misrepresentation and uncredited republication breach CC BY already, and are dealt with as attribution failures — a stricter licence adds no protection against them.

Authors who need a different licence for a specific reason should raise it with the editorial office before submitting, so the position is settled early.

Data and supplementary material

Supplementary files published alongside an article — appendices, instruments, coding frames, additional tables — carry the same CC BY licence as the article unless the file itself states otherwise.

Datasets are treated separately. Where data are deposited in a repository, they carry that repository’s licence, and the journal recommends CC0 for data, since attribution stacking across combined datasets makes CC BY awkward for reuse. The data availability statement records which licence applies — see the data availability policy.

Data that cannot be shared for ethical or legal reasons are not licensed at all, and the statement says so and explains why.

Material outside the licence

Occasionally an article contains third-party material that its rights holder would not release under CC BY. Where the journal accepts such an item, it carries its own rights line beside it stating that it is excluded from the article’s licence and that reuse requires permission from the named holder.

These exceptions are kept rare, and the rest of the article remains fully CC BY. Where no rights line appears, the material is covered by the article licence. Clearing such material is the authors’ responsibility under the copyright policy.

The website and journal identity

This licence covers article content. It does not cover the journal’s name, logo, branding or visual identity, which are not licensed for reuse, nor the design and code of this website.

In practical terms: you may republish an article in full and say where it came from, but you may not use the journal’s name or logo in a way that implies it published, endorsed or reviewed something it did not.

Machine-readable licence information

Licence terms are stated in a form that indexes, aggregators and repositories can read automatically, not only in prose:

• Each article page carries structured metadata naming the licence URL;
• The licence is included in the metadata deposited with Crossref against each article’s DOI;
• The licence statement appears on the article itself, so it travels with any copy of the PDF.

Changes to this policy

The journal may change the licence it applies to future articles. It cannot change the licence on an article already published: CC BY is irrevocable, and anyone who obtained the article under it keeps those rights permanently.

Any change would be announced before it took effect and would state the date from which it applied. Questions about reuse can be sent to ceoborjss@gmail.com, though in most cases the answer is that the licence already permits what you want to do.