Publication Terms and Conditions
Open Research Europe is an open access publishing platform for research stemming from Horizon 2020 funding. The platform is provided by F1000 Research Limited on behalf of the European Commission.
These Publication Terms and Conditions relate to the publication of any article or other document (the “Content”) on the platform. These are the terms on which your Content may be published by Open Research Europe. These do not relate to the publication of any user Comments (as defined below), which are covered by the User Comments Terms and Conditions.
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You warrant and represent on behalf of yourself and your co-authors (if any) that:
- you and/or your co-authors own copyright in the Content and have the necessary rights and permissions to grant the Service Provider a non-exclusive licence to publish the Content on an Open Access Basis under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0. or following) subject to these Publication Terms and Conditions and in accordance with clause 2 below;
- in the case of a multi-authored Content, you confirm that you are authorized by your co-authors to enter into these Terms and Conditions as their agent on their behalf;
- if the Content includes materials of others, including but not limited to proprietary text, illustrations, tables data, audio, audio, video, film stills, screenshots and musical notation, and if such insertion of the materials does not fall in the scope of an applicable copyright exception such as the quotation exception, you have obtained, a legally valid permission of the copyright owners of all such materials to enable you to grant the licence set out in clause 2 to Open Research Europe and you will provide proof of such permissions to the Service Provider promptly if so requested;
- you have acknowledged all sources of research funding, as required by your research funder, and disclosed any financial interest or benefit you have arising from the direct applications of your research;
- nothing in the Content is or could be construed as being obscene, defamatory, discriminatory, fraudulent, or in violation of any right of privacy, and does not plagiarise any another published work or infringe any intellectual property rights or any other human, personal or other rights of any person or entity or is otherwise unlawful;
- all persons who have a reasonable claim to authorship are named in the Content as co-authors including yourself, and you have not fabricated or misappropriated anyone’s identity, including your own;
- nothing in the Content infringes any duty of confidentiality which you may owe to anyone else or violates any contract, and all the institutions in which work recorded in the Content was carried out have, if needed, authorized publication of the Content;
- all research in the Content has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, and in full compliance with all relevant codes of experimentation and applicable EU, international and national rules and laws. If the Content reports in vivo experiments, research involving human participants (including clinical trials) or the use of biological material from humans (e.g. human stem cells, biopsies or tissues), or the use of animal models you must include a written statement to confirm that the research has been conducted in accordance with all ethical principles and applicable EU, international and national rules and laws, and that all applicable approvals or other mandatory documents, notably from any (national or local) ethics committee or other bodies such as data protection authorities, have been obtained. Clinical trials must also have been registered in an appropriate registry and the trial registration number must be included in the article.
- in respect of any person upon whom the Content relates to (e.g. a patient), or who participated in the research you have conducted and who is described in the Content, that person (or, if applicable, that person’s parent or legal guardian or, where such a person is deceased, that person’s estate) has (1) given written informed consent to the inclusion of material, text or image, pertaining to themselves in the Content, and (2) acknowledged in writing that they cannot be identified via the Content, and further that you have anonymised that person such that they are not identifiable to any reader of the Content as far as possible;
- you have complied with all mandatory laboratory health and safety procedures in the course of conducting any experimental work reported in the Content, the Content contains all appropriate warnings concerning any specific and particular hazards that may be involved in carrying out any experiments or procedures described in the Content or involved in instructions, materials or formulae in the Content; the Content includes explicitly any relevant safety precautions; and cites, if an accepted Standard or Code of Practice is relevant, a reference to the relevant Standard or Code; and
- you have read and complied with the guidelines for authors on the Open Research Europe website.
- You grant to the Service Provider a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide right to publish the Content on an Open Access basis (CC BY), including the right to reproduce, distribute, display, license and store the Content including without limitation any text, artwork, images, tables and photographs contained therein, in whole or in part, in all forms, formats and media whether now known or yet to be developed, including print, digital and electronic form and as transparencies, including the right to edit and adapt the Content for the purpose of making such editorial changes as the Service Provider reasonably considers necessary to make the Content suitable for publication and the right to reproduce the Content for the purposes of indexing it, including the right to sub-licence this function to third-party indexing agencies.
- You confirm the Content will be made available by Open Research Europe on an Open Access basis under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY), and that you have read and understood the terms of the CC BY licence.
- You consent to the Service Provider using your Content for marketing and promotional purposes, at the Service Provider’s discretion.
- You hereby agree to indemnify and keep indemnified the Service Provider, its affiliates, contractors and agents from and against any and all losses (including without limitation direct, indirect and consequential loss), costs, claims, damages or expenses of whatever nature and howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly from any breach of these Terms and Conditions, including the warranties set out in these Publication Terms and Conditions, or from any alleged facts or circumstances which, if true, would constitute a breach of any of the warranties set out in these Publication Terms and Conditions.
- If the article is accepted for publication by Open Research Europe, Open Research Europe will publish your article on the platform in advance of any peer review being performed on the article. The acceptability of the article shall be decided by Open Research Europe at its discretion, bearing in mind the Open Research Europe publishing policies and guidelines. Open Research Europe reserves the right, at their discretion, to not proceed with publication at any time or to remove the Content following publication if there are legal concerns with the article.
- Publication of your article is subject to you providing the Service Provider with the underlying data underlying the results contained in the article if requested, or any other data in relation to your article that the Service Provider may request from time to time, and Open Research Europe validating such data. Any failure by you to provide this data to Open Research Europe shall result in Open Research Europe either delaying the publication date of the article or not publishing the article at all, as decided in Open Research Europe’s sole discretion.
- Once the article has been published on the platform, the Service Provider will invite reviewers to perform peer review on the article. You agree to your article being peer reviewed by at least two independent reviewers, in accordance with the Open Research Europe peer review guidelines on the Open Research Europe website, and to those peer review comments being published on the platform alongside the article.
- Your article will successfully complete the peer review process if it has received two “Approved” statuses by reviewers, or if it has received one “Approved” status and two “Approved with Reservations” statuses by two further reviewers.
- If an article has completed the peer review process, the article may be picked up for indexing by Google Scholar, or any other indexing service. The Service Provider shall have no liability to you in the event that your article is not indexed by Google Scholar or any other indexing service.
- Where your article has passed through an initial round of peer review but not completed the peer review process, then you may submit a revised version of the article for a further round of peer review, such revisions taking into account the reviewer’s feedback. In the event that your article has not completed the peer review process after a reasonable number of revised versions, as decided by the Service Provider acting reasonably, the latter has the right to state that any further versions submitted will not be submitted for further peer review by Open Research Europe.
- The Service Provider shall use its reasonable endeavours to ensure that an article is peer reviewed by suitable qualified experts, but shall have no liability for any failure of the article to achieve the Completion Criteria such that the article is not submitted for indexing, including where the reviewers have been invited to perform peer review by the Service Provider but have not done so for their own reasons. The Service Provider shall not be liable to you in the event that your article is not peer reviewed or not submitted for indexing, for any reason.