All articles from January 2019 onwards are published with open access under the CC-BY Creative Commons attribution license (the current version is CC-BY, version 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This means that the author(s) retain copyright, but the content is free to download, distribute and adapt for commercial or non-commercial purposes, given appropriate attribution to the original article.
Upon submission, author(s) grant IEC an exclusive license to publish, including to display, store, copy and reuse the content. The CC-BY Creative Commons attribution license enables anyone to use the publication freely, given appropriate attribution to the author(s) and citing IEC as the original publisher. The CC-BY Creative Commons attribution license does not apply to third-party materials that display a copyright notice to prohibit copying. Unless the third-party content is also subject to a CC-BY Creative Commons attribution license, or an equally permissive license, the author(s) must comply with any third-party copyright notices.
Preprint Policy
IEC’ supportive preprint policy encourages full open access at all stages of a research paper, to share and generate the knowledge researchers need to support their work. Authors publishing in IEC journals may share their work ahead of submission to a peer-reviewed journal, as well as during the IEC review process, on repositories or pre-print servers (such as ArXiv, PeerJ Preprints, OSF and others), provided that the server imposes no restrictions upon the author's full copyright and re-use rights. Also note that any manuscript files shared after submission to IEC journals, during the review process, must not contain the IEC logo or branding.
Correct attribution of the original source in repositories or pre-print servers must be included on submission, or added at re-submission if the deposition is done during the review process.
If the article is published, authors are then strongly encouraged to link from the preprint server to the IEC publication to enable readers to find, access and cite the final peer-reviewed version. Please note that we cannot consider for publication content that has been previously published, or is already under review, within a scientific journal, book or similar entity.
Article Sharing
IEC is a signatory of the STM Voluntary Principles for Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks as well as a member of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing. We believe that scholarly sharing is essential to maximize the dissemination of knowledge and to enable research collaboration. Authors who publish in IEC publications can share their research in various ways depending on the article version they wish to share:
For more information about all aspects of scholarly sharing and for practical tools on how and where an article can be shared, please visit http://www.howcanishareit.com/.