Copyright stays with you
Authors retain copyright in the articles they publish in Peer Academics. The journal does not ask you to transfer copyright and does not ask for an exclusive assignment. You remain the owner of your work after publication and may continue to use it — in teaching, in a thesis, in a book chapter, in a later article — without asking the journal for permission.
What the Publisher needs is not ownership but permission: a license from you that allows the journal to publish the article, keep it available, and let readers use it. That license is granted in writing at the point of acceptance, before publication, and never earlier. Nothing you do during submission or peer review transfers any right in your work.
The license the journal has not yet fixed
The Publisher has not yet selected the Creative Commons license under which articles will be distributed. The journal states this plainly rather than implying terms that do not exist. The intended model itself is settled:
- authors retain copyright;
- a Creative Commons license will be applied to every published article, so that readers know what they may do with it without having to write and ask;
- the same license will apply journal-wide, unless the Publisher decides otherwise and records that decision here.
What is not settled is which Creative Commons license. Do not assume CC BY, and do not assume any other variant. Peer Academics has published no article, so no license has yet been applied to any content, and there is no gap to be filled retroactively.
What the Publisher must record before the first article is published
Before the first article is published, the Publisher must decide and record all of the following on this page.
- The license, by name, version, and canonical URL — for example a specific Creative Commons license at a stated version, not "a Creative Commons license".
- Whether the license is journal-wide or chosen per article by the author, and if per article, the closed list of permitted options.
- Whether the license covers supplementary files and datasets as well as the article text, or whether those carry separate terms.
- Where the license is displayed: on the article landing page, inside the published file itself, and in the article metadata exposed to harvesters.
- The date from which the decision takes effect.
Two commitments bind the journal in the meantime, as stated in the Publishing Model: no article is published until the license applying to it is stated on the article itself, and you are asked to agree to the copyright and licensing terms in writing before publication. If you do not accept the terms offered, your manuscript is not published, you owe the journal nothing, and you may submit the work elsewhere immediately.
What this means for you now
- Do not state a license for Peer Academics content in a data availability statement, a funder report, or an institutional deposit. There is nothing accurate to state yet.
- If your funder or your institution requires a specific license — some mandates require CC BY and nothing narrower — tell the editor at submission, in the comments to the editor. The journal will tell you the licensing terms before you are asked to commit to them, so that you can withdraw rather than breach a mandate.
- If you posted a preprint under a license of your own choosing, check that it is compatible with publication here. An incompatibility has to be resolved before acceptance, not after. See the Preprints Policy.
Third-party material in your article
You are responsible for every piece of material in your article that you did not create: figures, tables, photographs, maps, screenshots, long quotations, questionnaire instruments, and archival documents. Before acceptance you must either establish that the material may be reproduced without permission — because it is out of copyright, or because a statutory exception applies — or obtain written permission from the rights holder covering publication in an open-access journal and onward reuse by readers. Send copies of permissions to the editor when asked. Where permission cannot be obtained, or is granted on terms narrower than the journal's own license, the material is removed, replaced, or described in words instead; an article is held until the point is resolved.
What you confirm when you submit
By submitting, you confirm that the work is yours, that you have the right to publish it, that it infringes no one's copyright, and that every named author has agreed to submission — see Authorship and Contributorship. An infringement claim that is later upheld is handled under Corrections and Retractions.
Attribution, moral rights, and citation
Whatever license is chosen, your right to be identified as the author of the work is unaffected. Because Peer Academics has no DOI prefix, cite an article by the journal name, the volume, the article number, and the article URL; anyone reusing your work should attribute it the same way.
The website itself
Copyright in the journal's website — its design, its logo, its name, and the pages other than articles, including this one — belongs to the Publisher, Asociația Societatea Studenților din Uniunea Europeană (EUSS). The license applied to articles does not extend to the site or its branding. Use of the site is governed by the Terms of Use.
Questions and complaints
Questions about copyright, permissions, or licensing go to [email protected]. If you believe content published by Peer Academics infringes your rights, write to the same address, identify the article and the material precisely, and state the basis of your claim. Where a claim is well founded the material is removed or corrected and a public notice explains what changed.