License and Copyright agreements

Author’s certification 

By submitting the manuscript, the authors certify the following:

• They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
• The work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or proceedings-type publication – including discussion papers – or as part of a published lecture or thesis); it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; and its publication has been approved by all the authors and by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work was carried out.
• They have secured the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere.
• They agree to the following license and copyright agreement:

Copyright

• The copyright of any article is retained by the authors.
• Authors grant our journal a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.
• Authors grant any third party the right to use the article freely under the stipulation that the original authors are given credit and the appropriate citation details are mentioned.
• The article is distributed under the Creative Commons – Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0). Unless otherwise stated, associated published material is distributed under the same license.

Copyright transfers

Many authors have strict regulations in their employment contract regarding their publications. A transfer of copyright to the institution or company is common as well as the reservation of specific usage rights. In open-access publications in combination with the Creative Commons License, a transfer of the copyright to the institution is possible as it belongs to the author anyway. Any usage rights are regulated through the Creative Commons License. As the journal uses the Creative Commons – Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0), anyone is free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work as long as the original author is given credit. Therefore, specific usage rights cannot be reserved by the authors or their institution or company, and the publisher cannot include the statement “all rights reserved” in any published paper. A copyright transfer from the authors to their institution or company can be expressed in a special “copyright statement” at the end of the publication. Authors are asked to include the following sentence: “The author’s copyright for this publication has been transferred to institution/company”.

Reproduction Request 

All articles published by the journal are licensed under the Creative Commons – Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0), together with an author copyright. Therefore, there is no need from the publisher’s side to give permission for the reproduction of articles. We suggest contacting the author to inform him/her about the further usage of the material. However, as the author decided to publish the scientific results under the already cited license, he/she has consented to share the work under the condition that the original authors be given credit.