Copyright, author rights, responsibilities and entitlements

What happens about copyright?

In accordance with academic and professional protocols, Inderscience cannot accept an article if it is not the author's original work, has been published before (but see our notes regarding conference papers), or is currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. The article must not contain any libellous or unlawful statements or in any way infringe the rights of others. A full statement of our Ethical Guidelines for Authors (PDF) is available. The author must be the owner of the copyright and be entitled to sign the Author Copyright Agreement. In submitting an article, the author complies with these conditions.

If/when an article is accepted for publication, Author Copyright Agreements should be submitted via the online submission system, along with the final accepted version of the article. Each author must sign a copyright agreement (Author Copyright Agreement) form after reading the Explanatory Notes below. Signatures of all authors may appear on one form or be sent on individual forms. Each form must list the names of all authors of the article under the title of the article at the top of the form, and must reflect the order given in the article. We would expect a "Corresponding Author" to be responsible for the collection and provision of the copyright assignment from each author.

Author Copyright Agreement and Explanatory Notes (PDF)

(Advice on how to add digital signatures can be found here (PDF).)

N.B. This applies only to articles which are not Open Access; details on Open Access are available here.

Why do we ask you to transfer copyright to us?

Inderscience is wholly committed to the highest standards of publishing, founded on rigorous double-blind peer review. In all that we do, we work to ensure the widest possible access to the articles that we publish, to enhance the reputation of the author, the journal, its Editor and Editorial Board, and the value that we add as publisher in both printed and online forms.

In order that we can do this properly and professionally, we ask authors of articles accepted for publication to sign our Author Copyright Agreement assigning (or transferring) copyright to Inderscience.

The transfer of copyright is standard practice in journal publishing. This enables us, as the publisher, to negotiate subsidiary licences to database aggregators and document supply companies, and allows permissions to reproduce articles in books, course packs, electronic reserve or for library loan to be handled efficiently and with sensitivity to changing library and reader needs.

This relieves authors of a time-consuming and costly administrative burden. It also enable us to defend and enforce authors' rights against plagiarism, copyright infringement, unauthorised use and, most important for authors' professional reputation, breach of authors' moral rights.

  • What rights do authors retain?
  • What happens when the author does not own copyright of the article?
  • What are the author's responsibilities?
  • What happens if there is more than one author?

Find answers to these questions here (PDF).

(N.B. This information does not apply to articles designated by authors as Open Access and for which the appropriate arrangements have been made. Information on OA is available here).

For any queries about copyright, please contact .

What am I entitled to once my article is published and what am I allowed to do with the published article?

Authors of accepted articles will receive a PDF file of their published article. Hardcopies of journal issues may be purchased at a special price for authors from .

Authors can use their article for non-commercial purposes after publication in these ways:

  • Posting the Author's Original*on the Author's personal or departmental web pages and/or institutional repositories and/or subject repositories without embargo and sharing it as much as desired. For open [freely available] repositories, if the manuscript was funded by either RCUK or the Wellcome Trust, use the CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0. Otherwise, follow the licensing restrictions applied to all material copyrighted by Inderscience;
  • Posting the Accepted Manuscript*
  • on the Author's personal or departmental web pages or social media at any point after publication and/or
  • on institutional repositories and/or subject repositories subject to an embargo of 6 months after publication or
  • on academic social networks such as Mendeley, ResearchGate or Academia.edu subject to an embargo of 6 months after publication;
  • Posting the Version of Record* to a subject-based repository such as PubMed Central only in cases where a funding agency providing the grant for the research on which the Article is based requires this of the Author, upon condition that it shall not be accessible until after six months from Inderscience's publication date. The PDF of the VoR should not be posted anywhere else unless it has been published as Open Access. This also applies to any Author who has published with Inderscience in the past;
  • Using the article in further research and in courses that the Author is teaching;
  • Incorporating the article content in other works by the Author.

In all cases, acknowledgement in the form of a full citation must be given to the journal as the original source of publication, together with a link to the journal webpage and/or DOI as soon as they are available.

*Versions of a paper defined as

  • Author's Original = Author's manuscript prior to peer review [often called a 'preprint']
  • Accepted Manuscript = Accepted version of author's manuscript, accepted for publication, i.e. post-review, pre-typesetting. We recommend retaining this version for future posting.
  • Version of Record = Publisher's version of finished article