Open Access, Copyright and Archiving

All SSG journals are fully open access. Authors keep the copyright in their articles. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Any fee is stated before submission, and is charged only after a manuscript has been accepted.

Every article can be read, downloaded, and shared free of charge as soon as it is published. Readers do not need to register or pay. There are no embargo periods and no subscription content.

• Copyright stays with the authors, or with their employer where the law or employment terms require it. The copyright line on every article reads: "© [Year] The Author(s). Published by Scientific Steps International Publishing Services L.L.C. under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0)."
• Licence: each article is published under CC BY 4.0. Anyone may share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as they credit the original authors and source, link to the licence, and say whether changes were made. The licence is shown on the article page, in the PDF, and in the Crossref metadata.
• Open Access Publishing Agreement: after acceptance, the corresponding author signs the Open Access Publishing Agreement and Author Declaration on behalf of all authors. It gives SSG a non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, and archive the article, and to send its metadata to indexing services. It does not transfer copyright.
• Third-party material: authors must get permission to reuse any figure, table, or text that is not their own and not openly licensed, and must give the credit line in the caption.
• Website content: the website's own design and text, apart from the articles, are © Scientific Steps Group. This is separate from the copyright in the articles.

Authors may deposit any version of their article in institutional or subject repositories, or on personal websites, at any time and without embargo. This includes the submitted version, the accepted manuscript, and the published version. When the article is published, they should link to its DOI.

Authors may withdraw a manuscript free of charge at any time before acceptance. After acceptance, it can be withdrawn only for serious reasons, such as an error found in the data, and with the Editor-in-Chief's approval. Once an article is published, it cannot be withdrawn. It can only be corrected or retracted (Corrections and Retractions).

Fees and waivers are described on the Article Processing Charges page.

Every SSG article has a DOI. Metadata is sent to Crossref so that indexing services can find and link the content.

5.1 Digital preservation

• The journals' OJS platform is configured so that the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS preservation networks can archive the published content. SSG has no formal preservation agreement with these networks at present.
• SSG keeps its own backups of all published files and metadata.

5.2 Persistent identifiers

5.3 Metadata deposited with Crossref

SSG deposits article metadata with Crossref, including title, authors and affiliations, abstract, licence information and, where available, reference lists, ORCID iDs, and ROR IDs.

5.4 Website and access

• Journal homepages, policies, and HTML articles are hosted at scientificstepsgroup-ssg.com. Submission, peer review, and PDF files are hosted on SSG's journal platform at scientificsteps-group.com. Both sites belong to Scientific Steps Group, use HTTPS, and link to each other.
• Each article page shows the full citation, the DOI, all the dates, the licence, and a free PDF download.
• Each journal page lists only the indexing databases where the journal is currently and verifiably indexed. If no database applies yet, the "Indexed in" section is left out rather than shown empty.