Open Access Policy

All research articles published in UK Zhende journals are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. Articles are published under the terms of a Creative Commons license which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:

The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship [2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

Retain copyright with a Creative Commons license

The corresponding author is responsible for completing and returning the signed Open Access Agreement to the editorial office or the publisher. You can find the Open Access Agreement in Author Services once the article is accepted. For journals that have chosen not to use Author Services, the agreement is available from the journal’s editorial office.

Use our Open Access Journal List to check which Creative Commons license is offered by your journal of choice.

All of UK Zhende fully open access journals and most of journals with the open access option publish open access articles under a Creative Commons license. With Creative Commons licenses, the author retains copyright and the public is allowed to reuse the content. You grant UK Zhende a license to publish the article and to identify as the original publisher. Most journals in our open access program offer one or more of three license types. The selected license type will be indicated in the Open Access Agreement.

Choosing your Creative Commons License

All license types offered by UK Zhende require the author to be attributed for their work.

CC BY – Creative Commons Attribution License

Allows users to copy, distribute and transmit an article, adapt the article as long as the author is attributed. The CC BY license permits commercial and non-commercial reuse.

CC BY-NC – Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License

Allows users to copy, distribute and transmit an article, adapt the article as long as the author is attributed and the article is not used for commercial purposes.

CC BY-NC-ND – Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs License

Allows users to copy, distribute and transmit an article as long as the author is attributed, the article is not used for commercial purposes, and the work is not modified or adapted in any way.

Data Sharing Policies

Researchers are to share their data to provide other researchers the ability to expand and build upon their published claims. Authors are encouraged to share and make available any data and materials supporting the results or analyses presented in their paper. Research data can be uploaded to repositories with the access information included in the article or appended in supplementary files. Any restrictions on the availability of the published research materials or relevant information therein must be disclosed to the editors directly at the time of submission and cited in the submitted manuscript.

Data Availability Statement

Authors are encouraged to provide a data availability statement (DAS), detailing where data associated with a paper can be found and how it can be accessed, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to datasets utilized or generated therein. The DAS should be included in the submitted manuscript, before the ‘References’ section (not required for review articles), clearly indicating the location and access manner of the study’s data being shared, and providing an explanation to the unavailability of the data which cannot be released.

During a peer-review, the Journal’s editors may require, as a condition for publication, that the data supporting the results in the paper be peer-reviewed and archived in an appropriate public repository. In such cases, a data availability statement is required, with a list of citations for the shared data, and a link to the repository used. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the soundness of any shared data. Any errors in the data rest solely on the provider of the shared dataset(s). Peer reviewers and editors will be rigorously examining the manuscript’s data availability statement and its compliance with the journal’s data sharing policy.