Terms – pubeta

1. Who We Are

PUBETA is an Open Access scholarly publisher that publishes academic journals (referred here as Journals). In these terms, Websites (with a capitalized W) refer to all PUBETA websites, including those of Journals.

2. These conditions cover all interactions with PUBETA and its websites

These Conditions will continue to apply to all Journals except to the extent of any clear inconsistency or contradiction with the conditions published for a specific Journal, which will prevail to the extent of that inconsistency or contradiction, and only in connection with that Journal.

Journals may have additional conditions, which, if applicable, will appear on the Website of the Journal concerned. Journal Conditions apply only to the Journal on whose Website they appear.

These terms create a contract between you and PUBETA whenever you interact with us, whether or not you are registered.

Interactions can include visits to any Website; the submission, review, acceptance (or rejection) and publication of articles. Other rules and procedures of Journals (Author Guidelines, Privacy Policy and Copyright Statement etc), also apply.

Other specific terms, such as the applicable conditions for editors, will also apply if you are or become an editor with any Journal.

Our contract with you is personal to you and may not be assigned or transferred by you to any other person.

Your right to use any Website and any related functionality is conditional on your complying with these conditions and all other applicable rules and conditions specified by PUBETA.

3. Registering with PUBETA

To register at our Websites you must provide at least the minimum information required. Separate registration may be required for different Websites/Journals.

You should check to ensure that you have only one profile per each Website (e.g. per Journal), to avoid confusion.

Who may register? Natural persons aged 18 or over may register, and you must register in your own name. You may not create more than one profile. By registering with us you promise PUBETA that the information you provide is accurate and not misleading.

PUBETA may refuse or cancel a registration, at its discretion, with or without notice.

4. What it means to register as a user of PUBETA

Registering with PUBETA Websites also means accepting the following:

you have read, understood and agree with these Conditions and all our other policies as stated in the Websites;
you must comply with these terms and all other rules and conditions of PUBETA. This obligation applies to all users, whether or not registered;
you must comply with all generally-accepted academic and scientific norms and PUBETA’s own principles, as well as any additional principles of Journals;
you understand that PUBETA is not obliged to publish any content contributed by you, and that PUBETA may at its discretion remove any content of any kind contributed by you, including retracting peer-reviewed articles;
Communications and emails: By registering with PUBETA, you consent to receiving email and other communications from PUBETA and from our Journals. If you do not agree to receive such emails and communications, you may not register with PUBETA and PUBETA may cancel any existing registration;
You must keep your email and other contact details up to date in your registration information.

If you wish to close your account with PUBETA or with any of our Journals you should contact PUBETA and/or the Journal’s specific contact person.

5. Privacy, Personal Data and Cookies

PUBETA strives to comply, as a minimum, with Greek and EU laws on privacy and data protection and to apply the principles of recognized cross-border data protection procedures. Our privacy policy provides detailed information on what personal data we collect, how we use it and your rights concerning our processing of your data.

You are responsible for maintaining the security of your password. Do not share your password with any other person. If there is any reason to believe your password security may have been breached, change it immediately. Choose strong passwords and avoid obvious passwords. You must notify us immediately if you believe that unauthorized access has been gained to your account. PUBETA is not responsible for any damage suffered by you due to insufficient attention to security on your part.

It is important to keep your personal information up to date. Please check it regularly.

6. Ownership of Website, Software and Content; Trademarks

PUBETA is the owner of the Websites and of all copyright and other intellectual property rights in those assets. PUBETA is the owner of the combination of all content on PUBETA Websites, and of the look and feel of its Websites.

PUBETA does not own, or claim ownership of, the copyright in articles you submit to any Journal – you (or your employer or funder) continue(s) to own the copyright in your articles. See below and the copyright statement for more information.

7. Licenses (Permissions) You Grant as an Author

When you submit an article (which includes the article abstract, but excludes article metadata, as defined below) to any Journal, you grant to and to the world at large a permanent, non-cancellable, free-of-charge, worldwide license (permission) to publish, display, store, copy, adapt and re-use that article – including any third-party materials – and to create derivative works from it. You cannot terminate that license. You must ensure that you have all necessary permissions from the owner of the copyright in your article, which may be your employer or funder, and from all other third parties who own the copyright in any aspect of your article. Ownership by a third party of the copyright can still be notified on the relevant materials, and attribution must be made in accordance with usual scholarly practices.

The license (permission) you grant over your article (including the abstract and any third-party materials included in your article) is, unless otherwise stated for an article or for the relevant Journal, a Creative Commons attribution license (known as a “CC-BY” license). You cannot terminate that license. For some governmental or international governmental organizations, the license may be another, similar, license.

In summary, the CC-BY license means that anyone may copy, re-publish, adapt and/or re-use your content, and create derivative works from it, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, without charge, but must clearly attribute the work to you and any co-authors, and they must cite the original publisher of that content. Complete information can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

You agree that as the Creative Commons organization updates the CC-BY license, the license terms granted by you are automatically updated to the new version.

Reproduction of all or part of an article is also subject to compliance with usual academic attribution practices, which must be scrupulously complied with in addition to the CC-BY requirements.

License over certain article and journal metadata. Article and journal metadata, as defined in this paragraph, are the property of PUBETA and are subject to a Creative Commons CC0 license. “Article and journal metadata” means the following elements, to the extent applicable, in relation to the journal or each article, as applicable: Publisher, journal name, journal abbreviation, ISSN, DOI, article ID, subject, article type, article title, article URL, author names, contributor group, author note, author affiliation, Orcid URLs, authors’ email address, publication date, acceptance date, submission date, volume number, issue volume ID, issue number, issue ID, permissions, copyright statement, copyright year, copyright holder, license information, creative commons URL, conflict of interest statement, keyword group, figure count, table count, equation count, reference count, page count, word count, supplementary material count, funding statement, funder / contract / sponsor / grant and number, citation, product information, conference information. No elements other than those listed in this paragraph are included in article or journal metadata, and nor are they licensed under CC0 terms, unless confirmed by PUBETA.

You may not reproduce or publish any content in any forum (online or not) which advocates any political, religious, anti-religious, racist, extremist, violent or disrespectful viewpoints. If you post any Website content in such a forum, you must remove it immediately on request by PUBETA.

You may also not reproduce any content from any Website in order to denigrate PUBETA, any client of PUBETA or any Journal.

The same CC-BY license also applies to any other content which you may submit to PUBETA.

You irrevocably grant us permission to use, and to permit others to use, any non-patented ideas set out in your content or in any message sent or submitted to PUBETA, without any charge and without restriction, for any purpose in any part of the world.

It is your responsibility to comply with the conditions of any third-party website on which you may post content originally published on any Website. PUBETA are not bound by the conditions of any third-party website.

8. Conditions for submission of articles for peer-reviewed publication

Submission of the article

If published, your article will in principle remain published permanently, with your personal details and those of your co-authors on the Journal’s Website, and will be stored and made public in archives, in repositories and potentially in other places. By submitting an article you consent to a limited amount of your personal data being thus published.

When you submit an article to any Journal, you promise that:

The article is not under consideration by any other journal; if it has been submitted for consideration elsewhere, it has been definitively rejected and is no longer being considered for publication;
The article will not be submitted for publication elsewhere unless either published or rejected by PUBETA;
You have the explicit consent of all co-authors to submit the article and to accept these conditions, including the granting of the CC-BY or other applicable license, on behalf of all co-authors;
You have the authorization of all copyright owners (which may include your employer or funder, and any owners of third-party graphics) to submit the article and to grant the CC-BY or other applicable license over the article;
an article submitted to report original research is an original contribution, meaning it contains content that has not been previously published in its current form (except for manuscripts deposited as pre-prints in established community-validated pre-print services).
the article does not contain any non-attributed content from any existing source, including the authors’ own existing material;
all contributors have been adequately acknowledged;
the article and all authors meet the authorship criteria as outlined in the author guidelines;
the article complies with all the rules on content set out below;
all findings have been verified in accordance with the highest scientific standards in the relevant field;
all research involving regulated animals (i.e. all live vertebrates and higher invertebrates) has been conducted in accordance with relevant institutional and national guidelines, all applicable legislation and guidelines and accepted best practices, and the approval body has been identified in the article;
research involving human subjects has been conducted in accordance with the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki;
the article clearly declares any financial, commercial or other relationships which may be considered to represent a potential conflict of interest; and
you have disclosed all relevant facts to PUBETA concerning the author(s), the article, the underlying research, any relevant third-party rights and any actual or potential conflicts of interest.

Acceptance and Rejection

Acceptance is at PUBETA’s discretion in accordance with its rules and processes. Once accepted, an article will in principle be published; on rare occasions an issue causing rejection may arise or be discovered, in which case the article may be rejected prior to publication despite having been previously accepted.

Publication

There is no prior right to publication. Articles submitted will be subjected to ethical and technical checks and then to our rigorous and interactive peer-review process, which will require your cooperation.

If the article is accepted for publication, you will become liable to pay the applicable article publication charge (APC), or to ensure that it is paid.

Peer-review processes are designed to ensure scientific rigor. They do not include checks for the satisfaction of the other requirements (such as copyright permissions on images and graphics, for example).

Indexing/Ranking etc

PUBETA will use reasonable efforts to expand post-publication coverage of all Journals within the main academic databases, scope-specific databases and country-specific journal ranking lists. But apart from this PUBETA shall not owe any further services. In particular but not limited to, PUBETA will not provide or warrant any indexation or abstracting of publications, repository delivery services, digital preservation of publications or similar services. You acknowledge that PUBETA has no influence or control on journal rankings, indexation or de-indexation of publications or the number of publications citations.

Disclosure of inventions

You must ensure that all patent applications have been filed prior to submission of your article. Publication of an article is likely to reduce or cancel the patentability of any unpatented ideas in that article.

The Published Article

Once published, an article cannot be removed except by decision of PUBETA and/or the Journal in accordance with accepted retraction processes. The article is likely to be archived and referenced in a number of archives and repositories.

Articles published in our Journals will be published with the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s).

PUBETA reserves the right to remove any content, and to retract peer-reviewed articles, which in its view breach any applicable conditions and/or which we consider to be inappropriate in any way. Such removal does not entitle the author to reimbursement of APCs.

PUBETA is not liable for the acts or statements of others.

Disputes

We have mediation processes for settling disputes related to articles, and we mutually promise to exhaust those possibilities prior to commencing any judicial dispute resolution mechanisms.

9. Your Rights as a User; Restrictions on Your Rights

As a user, registered or not, you may use all open functionalities of the Websites if you comply with all applicable conditions and rules. Some functionality may be restricted to registered users or to certain types of users (such as editors).

You may benefit from the CC-BY license (or other licenses as may be indicated for specific Journals or articles) over articles and other content, and from a CC0 license for certain article metadata, all as described elsewhere in these Conditions.

If you are a registered user, you may create links to our Websites from other respectable websites, but not from any website which does not comply with the requirements of these conditions. PUBETA may remove any links and/or require their removal, and you must comply with such a request. PUBETA is not responsible for the content of third-party websites.

Uploading of supplementary material is subject to all related rules, including third-party and intellectual property rules. Be aware of the warranties you give concerning your right to upload any content.

10. Rules on Content

All content submitted to any Website, whether or not peer-reviewed, must comply with these rules. This is your responsibility when you submit any article or content.

All content must:

be accurate or be genuinely believed to be accurate after duly rigorous investigation;
only state opinions which are genuinely held;
comply with all generally accepted scientific and academic norms and with all accepted citation rules and norms, and must give appropriate credit for contributions;
comply with all accepted ethical rules and norms, including any ethical guidelines of PUBETA or of the Journal in question;
not infringe any intellectual property rights (including copyright, moral rights and database rights) of any person;
be the subject of any necessary consents and authorizations;
not breach any conditions of any website or other forum from which that content was copied or derived, or to which you provide a link, or from which you have provided a link to our website;
not be defamatory;
not be malicious, offensive, discriminatory, threatening, racist, extremist; not promote hatred or violence or denigrate any person, group of people or set of beliefs, or provide any link to any such material;
only be for the purpose of furthering scientific and academic discourse in good faith, and in particular not be for the purpose, or have the effect, of promoting any commercial offering, service, product or interest, without the prior explicit agreement of PUBETA;
not give a false impression that it emanates from PUBETA or any Journal or is approved by PUBETA or otherwise be misleading in any way;
not be pornographic or indecent;
remain polite and respectful, especially when disagreeing;
not ascribe any negative psychological or other labels or descriptions to any named or identifiable person or group of people, without the specific, informed consent of the person or people concerned to such label or description being ascribed to him/her/them;
not be for the purpose, or have the primary effect, of promoting any political, societal, religious or anti-religious views;
not disclose confidential information, including personal data of others, without the consent of the owner of that information or data;
comply with all applicable laws and regulations.

11. Description of Services / Article Publication Charges (APCs)

PUBETA receives payments in the form of Article Publication Charges (APCs) for articles that pass peer review and are accepted for publication in its Journals. Copyediting is generally included in the APC (unless stated otherwise for a specific Journal), and will be initiated only after the APC is fully paid.

In the event of any APC readjustment after the submission of a given article, the APC in effect upon submission will apply to that article.

The APC may be linked to the length of the article (for example, to the number of pages). Because length may increase or decrease during peer review, the length of the finally accepted version will be used to calculate the APC.

Revised versions cannot be submitted and will not be considered after acceptance.

Waivers (including offers to reviewers) may be applied under specific conditions. Exact fees and policies are stated on each Journal’s Website.

By submitting an article, authors declare that they accept all terms and conditions of PUBETA and of the relevant Journal, including the APC policies.

12. Cancellations and Refunds

Authors may withdraw their articles at any time before publication. However, a withdrawal does not justify the refund of the APC.

If authors request a withdrawal while a review round is ongoing, PUBETA may require that all review reports be submitted before the submission is declared withdrawn and the review process terminated.

In case of overpayment, authors may request a partial refund of the overpaid amount; any bank or transaction charges will be deducted from that refund.

If the length of the article is used to calculate the APC, length changes during the copyediting process will not justify a partial refund or any additional charges (in case of decreased or increased length correspondingly).

PUBETA will try to work with authors to achieve the best possible result during the copyediting/proofreading process. However, all final decisions regarding the final version will be taken by each Journal’s team and/or PUBETA as the publisher, and a refund cannot be requested and will not be granted for such reasons (including disagreements with copyediting decisions).

Where additional clarifications are required during copyediting, the article may be put on hold until the procedure is concluded. Such an action will not justify a refund.

PUBETA reserves the right to cancel the publication of accepted articles and to retract published articles which, in PUBETA’s view, breach any applicable conditions and/or which PUBETA considers to be inappropriate in any way. Such removal does not entitle the author to reimbursement of APCs.