Open Access Policy

Open Access

What is Open Access?

Open access publishing refers to unrestricted reuse and redistribution. It facilitates easy access for research distribution and its global transmission to any internet user for free.

      Open access publishing is a reverse process to the traditional print publishing method where the publishers holds the copyrights to the articles published in their journals. A reader has to pay to access the articles and obtain permission to use them. Overcoming these accessing barriers open access publishing is a new generation digital publishing where the author is charged the cost of publication process for an article and made available on-line for free to everyone.

      Other than their cost-recovery model, Open Access journals are no different from traditional subscription-based journals; they undergo the same peer-review and quality control as any other scholarly journal. Moreover, Open Access allows for maximum visibility, uptake and use of the published material.

Open Access @ SSE-UK

All original research papers published by the Society for Science and Education, United Kingdom (SSE-UK) are made freely and permanently accessible on-line immediately upon publication. Open access publishing allows an immediate, world-wide, barrier-free, open access to the full text of research papers, which is in the best interests of the scientific community.

  • ◈ High visibility for maximum global exposure with open access publishing model
  • ◈ Rigorous peer review of research papers
  • ◈ Prompt faster publication with less cost
  • ◈ Guaranteed targeted, multidisciplinary audience

SSE-UK is striving for membership in the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), adheres to its CODE OF CONDUCT and supports the STATEMENT ON OPEN ACCESS.

How Open is SSE-UK on the “Open Access Spectrum”?

SSE-UK supports the Budapest Open Access Initiative and shows its “openness” clearly in the standardized form on the Open Access Spectrum.

  1. Reader Rights
  2. Reuse Rights
  3. Copyrights
  4. Author Posting Rights
  5. Automatic Posting
  6. Machine Readability

SSE-UK tries to be as open as practically possible on all 6 Open Access components:

  1. SSE-UK is fully open on Reader Rights.
  2. SSE-UK is fully open on Reuse Rights by granting a Creative Commons license Attribution (CC BY). As such all SSE-UK journals qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals. For authors who want to be more protective SSE offers only on special request the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) as an alternative.
  3. SSE-UK asks authors to grant SSE-UK a non-exclusive copyright. In this way authors continue to hold copyright with no restrictions. This makes SSE-UK a fully open publisher also in this component.
  4. Only the authors hold copyright for their manuscripts before peer-review (“preprints”) and after peer-review (“postprints”). For this reason authors are allowed to post their raw manuscripts on any repository or website. SSE-UK does not ask authors to waive this right. Once the manuscript is accepted for publication (after peer-review) authors grant SSE-UK a non-exlcusive copyright (see 3.). Based on this copyright SSE-UK produces the final paper in SSE-UK’s layout. This version is given to the public (and hence also back to the authors) under the Creative Commons license (see 2.). For this reason authors may also publish the final paper on any repository or website with a complete citation for the paper. When linking to their paper, authors should make use of the link that SSE-UK has established with crossref.org. It is a pointer to the full text of the final paper. The URL provides a persistent link which will never break. This link has the form http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/YourPaperNumber.
  5. Articles are made available on-line directly without any delay. (see OnlineFirst). Moreover the RSS feeds are made available for the Table of Contents of ever new issue of each journal.
  6. SSE-UK strives to make articles as much Machine Readable as possible with current technology by using state of the art on-line reading tools.

Publication Ethics Statement

SSE-UK is committed to maintaining high standards through a rigorous peer-review together with strict ethical policies. Any infringements of professional ethical codes, such as plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, bogus claims of authorship, should be taken very seriously by the editors with zero tolerance.

     SSE-UK follows the Code of Conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and follows the COPE Flowcharts for Resolving Cases of Suspected Misconduct.