Open Access Policy

All research articles published in this journal are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. Articles are published under the terms of a Creative Commons license which permits readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and to use them for any other lawful purpose. 

Definition of Open Access Publication from Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing: An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).