Copyright Policy

All articles published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies are open-access articles, published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits reproduction, distribution, derivative works, and commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited and the authors and publisher are properly identified.

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects an author’s inherent right to their work. Unlike other forms of intellectual property, copyright comes into effect immediately. Once a person has expressed their ideas in a fixed form, such as a journal article, they own the copyright to that work. However, they may be required to transfer their copyright to a publisher in order to have their work published.

When an article is published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, the author(s) of the article retain the copyright of the article. Author(s) may republish the article as part of a book or other materials. When reusing a published article, author(s) should:

  • Cite the original source of the publication when reusing the article, i.e., cite that the article was originally published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies. Include the article DOI.
  • Accept that the article remains published by The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (except in the case of a retraction of the article).
  • The article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Some scholarly publishers require or request that authors transfer their copyright to the journal through a publication agreement or copyright transfer agreement. Typically, publishers request this to obtain exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, display, or modify the work. However, this can restrict a researcher’s ability to use and share their own work. For example, if an author has signed over their copyright to the publisher without specific clauses in the publication contract permitting it, they may not be able to deposit a copy of their work in an open-access repository.