Open Access & Copyright Policy
INDUSTRICS
Open Access & Copyright Policy
Everything INDUSTRICS publishes is open access: every article is freely available online, worldwide, from the moment of publication. No subscription, registration or payment is required to read, and no embargo applies to any content. For a journal whose readers include engineers in plants, maintenance teams, standards committees and regulators, a paywall does not merely restrict circulation — it puts the evidence out of reach of the people whose decisions the work was written to inform.
Copyright: authors retain it
Authors keep the copyright in their work without restriction. On acceptance, authors grant Scientara a non-exclusive licence to publish the article, to distribute it in all formats and media, and to identify the journal as the original venue of publication. Copyright transfer is never required.
Where the authors' employer holds the rights by contract — which is common in industrial research — the licence is granted by whoever lawfully holds them, and the article records that holder. What matters to the journal is that the rights exist and that the grant is valid, not which party carries the name.
Licence terms
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits the widest lawful reuse, satisfies the open access requirements of major research funders, and removes the need for case-by-case permission requests. A more restrictive Creative Commons licence is considered only where an author's funder, employer agreement or applicable law demonstrably requires it.
| Readers and reusers may | Condition |
|---|---|
| Read, download, print and redistribute the article in any medium | Attribution: credit the authors, cite the source with its DOI, name the licence |
| Adapt, translate, excerpt and build upon the work, including commercially and in internal engineering documentation | Indicate clearly if changes were made; do not imply endorsement by the authors, their employers or the journal |
| Perform text and data mining, including use in machine-learning corpora | Same attribution terms; no additional legal or technical restrictions may be imposed on the reused material |
One consequence deserves stating plainly, because it is the question industrial authors ask most often: CC BY permits commercial reuse, including by a competitor. Anyone may translate an article, reproduce its figures in a product brochure or incorporate its findings into a commercial process, provided the authors are credited and no endorsement is implied. The licence conveys no patent rights and no trade-mark rights, and it does nothing to weaken a patent already filed — but authors who intend to file should do so before publication, not after.
What the licence does not cover
- Third-party material. Figures, photographs, drawings, extended quotations, datasets and standards excerpts reproduced from other sources remain under their own terms and are excluded from the article's CC BY licence. Permission must be obtained and documented before submission, and the credit line must state the source and the terms. Text and tables from standards bodies are ordinarily licensed for limited quotation only; a normative clause may be cited and discussed, but not reproduced wholesale.
- Company-owned imagery and plant material. Photographs of installations, equipment and personnel require the owner's permission to publish, and identifiable individuals require their own consent.
- Trade marks and product names. Naming a product to identify what was tested is normal scholarly practice and is unaffected by the licence; nothing in CC BY grants the right to use anyone's trade mark as a mark.
Permission to publish
By submitting, the corresponding author confirms that every permission the manuscript depends on is already in place: from co-authors, from any employer or partner whose approval is contractually required, from the owner of any facility, equipment or data depicted, and from the holders of any third-party material reproduced. This is not a formality in an industrial journal. Work withdrawn after acceptance because an employer's clearance had not in fact been granted wastes the time of reviewers who gave it freely, and the journal will not begin review where such clearance is known to be outstanding.
Preprints and self-archiving
- Posting a preprint on a recognised server before or during submission is permitted and does not constitute prior publication. Authors are asked to link the preprint to the published article's DOI once it appears.
- Authors, and their employers, may deposit any version — submitted, accepted, or the published version of record — in institutional or subject repositories, on corporate and personal pages, or with a funder, immediately and without embargo.
- Reproduction in internal engineering documentation, training material and technical reports is likewise unrestricted under CC BY, subject to attribution.
- Because the published version carries the open licence and any subsequent corrections, it is the version the journal recommends citing and sharing.
Identifiers and preservation
Every article receives a DOI at publication and is deposited in long-term digital preservation, as set out in the archiving policy, so that the record remains intact and citable independently of the journal. Published articles are not removed; corrections and retractions are handled by linked notices that preserve the original record, in line with COPE guidance.