Open Access

LICENSES & COPYRIGHT PERMISSIONS POLICY

1. Creative Commons Open Access Licensing

  • 1.1. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License: All articles published in the Journal of Management Info (JMI) are made immediately and permanently free to read, download, copy, and distribute globally. Under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license:
    • Share: Users are permitted to copy, download, and redistribute the journal's content in any medium or format.
    • Adapt: Users may remix, transform, and build upon the published material for any purpose, including commercial applications.
    • Attribution: All reuse, redistribution, or adaptation of the material must feature appropriate credit, a functional link to the license, and clear indications of any changes made.
  • 1.2. Strategic Benefits for Authors: This open licensing structure ensures that authors experience increased global visibility. Because there are no paywalls, research is immediately available to policymakers, business leaders, and academics. This frictionless access significantly increases citation impact and facilitates the inclusion of JMI studies in data repositories, meta-analyses, and educational syllabi.

2. Copyright Retention and Author Rights

  • 2.1. Full Copyright Ownership: In alignment with modern open science practices, authors retain full, unrestricted copyright ownership of their manuscripts. Authors do not transfer their intellectual property rights to JMI or Readers Insight Publisher. Instead, authors grant the publisher a non-exclusive license to publish, index, and archive their work.
  • 2.2. License to Publish Agreement: Prior to publication, authors must sign a formal License to Publish agreement. This agreement grants JMI and Readers Insight Publisher the non-exclusive right to:
    1. Publish and distribute the final Version of Record (VoR) and identify JMI as the original publisher.
    2. Submit the article’s metadata and full text to global indexing and abstracting databases, including Crossref and Scopus.
    3. Deposit and maintain the article in decentralized digital preservation networks, such as LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, to ensure its permanent, long-term preservation.
  • 2.3. Author Warranties: By signing the licensing agreement, authors formally warrant that the submission is their original work, has not been published elsewhere, and does not infringe on any third-party intellectual property or copyright.

3. Permissions for Third-Party Material

  • 3.1. Author Responsibility: Authors are solely responsible for ensuring that their manuscripts do not violate existing third-party copyrights. This covers figures, illustrations, complex tables, photographs, lengthy text excerpts, and proprietary software code.
  • 3.2. Documenting Consent: If a manuscript utilizes copyrighted or adapted materials from other publications, authors must obtain formal written permission from the copyright holder (typically the original publisher) prior to submission. Documentation of these permissions must be supplied to the JMI Editorial Office upon request.
  • 3.3. Caption Credit: Reused material must feature a clear credit line in its caption identifying the original source and terms of use (e.g., "Reproduced with permission from [Source]").
  • 3.4. Preprints & Conference Papers:
    • Preprints: JMI encourages authors to share early drafts on preprint servers. In these instances, authors should ideally apply "no reuse" licenses to preprints to avoid legal conflicts with the final published Version of Record.
    • Conference Papers: Authors may expand high-quality conference papers into JMI research articles, provided they hold the copyright or have written permission from the conference organizer. The original conference paper must be cited on the first page of the submission.

4. Intellectual Property & Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • 4.1. AI Ineligibility for Copyright: Following consensus guidelines from COPE, ICMJE, and WAME, generative AI tools cannot hold or assign copyright. Legal authorship requires a "legal person" capable of taking ethical and legal responsibility for the work—criteria non-human software cannot meet.
  • 4.2. Human Liability: Human authors remain fully responsible and liable for the accuracy and originality of any AI-assisted sections, ensuring that AI tools did not introduce plagiarized material from their training datasets.
  • 4.3. Restriction on AI-Generated Visuals: Due to ongoing legal and copyright ambiguities, JMI prohibits the use of figures, illustrations, or graphs generated directly by generative AI. Standard data-derived plots from verified statistical software (e.g., R, Python) are exempt.

5. Open Science: Licensing for Research Data and Code

  • 5.1. Research Data (CC0 Waiver): To support replication, JMI encourages authors to deposit minimal datasets in trusted public repositories (e.g., Zenodo, Figshare) using a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) waiver. This places the dataset in the public domain, allowing global researchers to reuse and replicate findings without legal friction.
  • 5.2. Software and Analysis Code: Any custom analysis scripts or algorithms must be shared under recognized open-source licenses (such as MIT, BSD, or LGPL). Standard Creative Commons licenses are not recommended for code due to execution and technical incompatibilities.

6. Post-Publication Rights and Self-Archiving (Green Open Access)

  • 6.1. Self-Archiving Policy: Authors are permitted and actively encouraged to deposit the final Version of Record (VoR) of their article (the publisher's PDF) in institutional repositories, national libraries, or personal websites immediately upon publication, provided a full citation and link to the JMI publication are included.