By “open access” to peer-reviewed research articles, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or 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 other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over their work’s integrity and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

The Journal aims to promote the development of global Open Access to scientific information and research. The Publisher provides copyrights of all online published articles (except where otherwise noted) for free use of readers, scientists, and institutions (such as a link to the content or permission for its download, distribution, printing, copying, and reproduction in any medium, except change of contents and commercial use), under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License, provided the original work is cited. Written permission is required from the publisher for the use of its contents for commercial purposes.