Living reprints of open-access research · a compilation of journalsCC BY · CC BY-SA only
Literature DecodedStudies, unfolded.

Policy

Licence policy

We reprint only articles whose licence lets anyone republish and adapt them with credit.

What we accept

  • CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution, versions 2.0 to 4.0).
  • CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike). A reprint of a CC BY-SA article is itself shared under CC BY-SA.

What we refuse

  • Any non-commercial (NC) or no-derivatives (ND) licence, including CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND and CC BY-NC-SA.
  • Public-domain dedications (CC0), publisher-specific “open access” terms, articles with no stated licence, and any article whose licence text contradicts its own licence link (for example a CC BY link with “non-commercial use only” in the wording).
  • Retracted articles.

How a licence is checked

  1. The search record from Europe PMC must say CC BY or CC BY-SA.
  2. PubMed Central’s own metadata for the article (its open-access licence code and retraction flag) must say the same.
  3. The licence written inside the article’s full text must say the same, in every licence statement it carries, with no non-commercial or no-derivatives wording.

Refusal is the default: an article is reprinted only when all three positively agree. Every decision, accepted or refused, is kept in a log with the reason.

Material inside an article

A figure marked as reproduced with permission from a third party is not covered by the article’s licence. We show its caption and send readers to the version of record for the picture.

Attribution and changes

Every reprint names the authors, title, journal, year, DOI and licence, links the licence and the version of record, and lists the changes made: re-typesetting; figures re-encoded as JPEG (longest side 1600 px or less); mathematical notation simplified to text; in-text figure and table links removed; supplementary files left with the journal; author e-mail addresses left out.

Corrections, retractions and takedowns

If an article is corrected or retracted by its journal, or an author or rights holder asks us to remove it, we take the reprint down. Use the opt-out form or write to editors@rqai.co.uk.