Open Access Policy

Open access statement

BORJSS is a fully open access journal. It publishes no subscription content and operates no paywall of any kind. Every article is available in full, to every reader, from the moment of publication.

Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), and authors retain copyright in their own work. The journal takes no transfer of copyright and asks for no exclusive rights. Terms are set out in the licensing policy and the copyright policy.

What this means for readers

Anyone, anywhere, may do the following with any article in this journal without asking permission and without paying anything:

• Read it, and download the full text;
• Print it, copy it and distribute it;
• Use it in teaching, and include it in a course pack;
• Translate it, build on it, and reuse its figures and tables in new work;
• Use it commercially;
• Mine the text and data computationally.

The single condition is attribution: credit the original authors and the journal, link to the licence, and indicate any changes you made. There is no registration requirement, and readers are never asked for an account or an email address to read an article.

What this means for authors

• You keep your copyright. You grant the journal a non-exclusive right to publish; ownership stays with you.
• No embargo. You may share the published version immediately and anywhere — your repository, your website, a scholarly network, a mailing list.
• Wider reach. Your work is readable by researchers, practitioners and policymakers who have no journal subscription, which in this journal’s subject area is most of them.
• Funder compliance. Immediate CC BY publication with retained copyright satisfies the open access requirements of most research funders, including Plan S conditions on licence and embargo.

How it is paid for

Open access removes the reader-side income a journal would otherwise have. BORJSS covers its costs through a single article processing charge on accepted manuscripts. There is no submission fee, and nothing is charged on a manuscript that is declined.

The charge is waived where it would be a barrier. No manuscript is rejected, and no accepted manuscript is withheld, because an author cannot pay. Full waivers are granted automatically for students and early-career researchers without institutional funding, for unfunded research, and for corresponding authors in low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Charges and waivers are administered by the editorial office after a decision has been taken. Editors and reviewers are not told whether a fee will be paid or a waiver requested — see editorial independence. Current rates are on the publication charges page.

Self-archiving and preprints

Because authors retain copyright and the licence is CC BY, there is nothing the journal needs to permit — but for the avoidance of doubt:

Authors who posted a preprint should declare it at submission and cite it, as the plagiarism policy requires for any earlier version.

Preservation

Free to read is only meaningful if the article remains reachable. Two arrangements support that:

• Persistent identifiers. Every article carries a DOI registered with Crossref, so citations resolve even if this website’s addresses change.
• Independent deposit. Published content is deposited with a third-party preservation service so it survives independently of the publisher. This arrangement is being established alongside the journal’s indexing applications — its current status is shown on the indexing and archiving page.

Authors’ own right to deposit the published version in an institutional repository is itself a preservation measure, and the journal encourages it for that reason as well as for reach.

Text and data mining

The CC BY licence permits text and data mining of the full corpus, including for commercial purposes and including for training computational models, subject only to attribution. No separate permission is needed and none should be sought.

The journal asks only that automated collection be reasonable in rate so that the site remains usable for other readers. Where a machine-readable metadata feed would serve better than crawling, see the indexing and archiving page for what is available.

Why the journal chose this model

BORJSS publishes social science research substantially from institutions in South Asia and comparable settings. Those institutions are also the ones least likely to hold subscriptions to the journals in which such research would otherwise appear.

A subscription model would therefore place this work behind a barrier for exactly the researchers, practitioners and policymakers it most concerns. Open access is not a marketing position here; it is the only model consistent with the journal’s purpose. The commitment to waivers follows from the same reasoning — an author-pays model that excluded unfunded authors would reproduce the barrier on the other side.

Standards and definitions

This policy follows the definition of open access set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative — free availability on the public internet, with no barriers other than the requirement of attribution.

The journal meets the licensing, copyright and access criteria of the Directory of Open Access Journals, and will apply for listing once it has published the volume of content DOAJ requires before evaluation.

Questions about access, reuse or repository deposit can be sent to ceoborjss@gmail.com.