Open Access Policy
1.0 Overview
Cognizant of the challenges that are faced by scholars and other knowledge stakeholders globally, the East African Nature and Science Organization settled on policies that will promote the maximum and easiest access to knowledge as well as the usability, distribution and longevity of the same. With this in mind, a decision was made to make all journals hosted by all of our platforms in the present and in future open access. EANSO also adopted licensing and distribution policies that were not only targeted at improving the availability of knowledge but also the usability of it. This page outlines these policies and how they help us in our mission to advance humanity through research.
2.0 Open Access Policy
All our hosted journals are gold level open access. By making our journals open access, we imply that all the articles we publish in any of our hosted journals are freely available without payment or subscription fees. Immediately after publication, users are allowed to read, download, copy, modify, distribute, print, search, link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers. Being gold open access means that content becomes open access immediately after publication. The authors (or their institutions or funding agencies) will normally pay publication fees to get the articles published. This increases the usage, reach, citation, impact, conversations, collaborations and the benefits the given publications have. For the avoidance of doubt, this only applies to published articles and not submitted articles, articles under review or accepted articles that have not yet been published.
3.0 Copyright Holder
For the avoidance of doubt, even though our journals are the main distributors of the published articles, we do not lay claims of any sort to the copyrights of the published articles. All the rights belong to the respective authors as listed in the published articles. What this means is that the authors can do anything with the publication without having to seek our permission as their publisher. This includes republishing the articles on personal websites, submitting articles into repositories and databases, making the articles chapters in their theses, use as teaching courses and distribute to all course members, or reuse and modify parts of the articles.
4.0 Licensing and Distribution
Articles published by all our hosted journals are licensed under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License (CC BY). Under this license, users are given the right to reproduce and share the licensed materials, in whole or in part; and produce, reproduce, and share adapted materials. This can be done in any media and form as long as the users identify the creators of the licensed materials, include the associated copyright notice, a notice referring to this Public License, a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties and the DOI, URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable. Users should also indicate if they modified the licensed materials and retain indications of any previous modifications. This license however should not be used to imply that the licensor endorses or advocates for the use you decide to put the licensed materials to. Furthermore, moral rights, patents and trademark rights are not licensed. If you share the adapted materials you produce, the adapter's license you apply must not prevent recipients of the adapted material from complying with our license. The licensed material is offered as-is and as-available and makes no representations or warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or any other. This includes, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence or absence of errors, whether or not known or discoverable. Where disclaimers of warranties are not allowed in full or in part, this disclaimer may not apply to you. To the extent possible, in no event will the licensor be liable to you on any legal theory (including, without limitation, negligence) or otherwise for any direct, special, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, exemplary, or other losses, costs, expenses, or damages arising out of this license or use of the licensed material, even if the licensor has been advised of the possibility of such losses, costs, expenses, or damages. Where a limitation of liability is not allowed in full or in part, this limitation may not apply to you.
5.0 Repository and Archiving Policy
With respect to our Sherpa Romeo policy profile, authors retain the copyright of their work and are free to self-archive their articles in whichever databases or repositories they deem fit immediately after publication without any embargo. This includes their personal websites, PubMed Central, ArXiv, Pre-Print Server, other open access repositories, social media networks and their host institutions’ repositories. All our hosted titles are open access with the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License (CC BY). This means that users (both human and crawlers) are free to copy, modify and even redistribute the articles as deemed appropriate without prior permission from us as long as they cite the authors of the original work, link to the original article using DOI where available, ensure fair use and do not make the authors accountable to whatever consequences that such use might result in. All our journals are archived in PKP PN and selected Institutions in East Africa. We are in the process of registering for CLOCKSS archiving to ensure that all our published articles are available for future researchers.
