Licences and copyright

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Reuse of Article Content Published by ScienceBank

ScienceBank encourages communities to agree that anyone can reuse their published work, in whole or in part, for any purpose, for no cost, even for commercial purposes. These permitted uses include but are not limited to self-archiving by authors of submitted, accepted and published versions of their papers in institutional repositories. As a default, ScienceBank will publish all the articles with a licence allowing anyone to copy, redistribute, reuse, or modify the content as long as the author and the original source are properly cited. This policy facilitates freedom in reuse and also ensures that ScienceBank content can be mined without barriers to the benefit of research.

Communities and authors may apply for special licences and use restrictions due to the nature of their work, provided they ensure their publications remain open access for readers as a minimum standard. 

Terms of licence

As a default, ScienceBank applies the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) licence or other comparable licences that allow free and unrestricted use of articles and other work. 

Unless previously discussed and agreed with ScienceBank, if an author submits their paper for publication to ScienceBank, they agree to have the CC BY licence applied to their work. If the author’s institution or funder requires their work or materials to be published under a different licence or dedicated to the public domain, we strongly encourage authors to inform the ScienceBank team prior to submission. 

Questions and requests for special copyright permissions can be directed to cc@sciencebank.com. 

Use of content owned by someone else

If authors do not have owner permission for materials, ScienceBank will ask them to remove the content and/or replace it with other content that the author(s) own or have such permission to use. As such, authors will need to declare that they own all content or have permission to use it. If the manuscript contains content such as photos, images, clipart, tables, audio files, videos, proprietary protocols, or code that authors (including co-authors) do not own or did not create, ScienceBank will require proof that either:

  1. the material is in the public domain or available under an open-access license compatible with CC BY 4.0, or
  2. the owner of that content has given the author(s) written permission to use and publish the content under an open-access CC BY 4.0 licence.

Please note that purchasing copyright use is unlikely to meet this requirement, as many journals and publishers restrict the terms of purchased copyright use in ways that do not accommodate open-access publication. In addition, we cannot accept Creative Commons licensed materials with additional non-commercial (CC BY-NC), share-alike (CC BY-SA), or non-derivative (CC BY-ND) clauses.

It is the authors’ responsibility to ascertain the rights they possess, if any, to use content, including content found on the Internet where the source may not be declared.

Using article content that the author previously published in another journal

When an author publishes a manuscript, their work will be subject to the licensing terms of the publisher with which the author has agreed to work. This means that the authors will need to abide by those terms. For an author to be able to reuse the content in a new manuscript, the publisher that holds the licence for the content, must allow free and unrestricted re-use of that content, such as under the CC BY licence.

If the content was published under a more restrictive licence, then authors must review the licence to make sure they can use the content. Where required, authors should get written permission from the publisher.

Under all circumstances, authors must ensure that content can be published under a CC BY licence or another licence that allows free and unrestricted use and that authors may use the content in your ScienceBank paper provided that you give proper attribution. The only exceptions will be those previously discussed and endorsed by the ScienceBank team prior to submission.