Copyright and Licensing

Spectrum of Engineering and Management Sciences (SEMS) supports the need for authors to disseminate and thus maximize the impact of their research. When publishing in SEMS, the Corresponding Author is asked to transfer, with the consent of all Coauthors, the copyright ownership in the referenced submitted article, including all versions in any format now known or hereafter developed, to the SEMS (Copyright and warranty form). Copyright allows you to protect your original work and material and stop others from using it without your permission. It means that others will need to credit you and your work properly, thus increasing its impact. If the submitted article is not accepted by SEMS or withdrawn prior to acceptance by SEMS, this transfer will be null and void.

Authors, users or readers of an article also need to be clear on how they can use the article. SEMS adopts Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International License, which governs how authors, publishers and the wider general public can use, publish and distribute articles. Below is the quick reference guide of the permitted reuse of your article.

Authors may:

  • read, print, and download the articles,
  • redistribute or republish the final article (e.g. display in a repository),
  • translate the article for private use only and not for distribution,
  • download for text and data mining purposes,
  • reuse portions or extracts from the article in other works,
  • not sell or re-use the article for commercial purposes.

A digital file of the published article or the link to the published article (SEMS web page) may be made publicly available on websites or repositories, such as the Author’s personal website, preprint servers, university networks, or primary employer’s institutional websites, third party institutional or subject-based repositories, and conference websites that feature presentations by the Author(s) based on the published article, under the condition that the posting must be for non-commercial purposes.

Reproducing Published Material from other Publishers

It is absolutely essential that authors obtain permission to reproduce any published material (figures, schemes, tables or any extract of a text) which does not fall into the public domain, or for which they do not hold the copyright. Permission should be requested by the authors from the copyright holder (usually the Publisher, please refer to the imprint of the individual publications to identify the copyright holder).

Permission is required for:

  • Your own works published by other Publishers and for which you did not retain copyright.
  • Substantial extracts from any ones' works or a series of works.
  • Use of Tables, Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks if they are unaltered or slightly modified.
  • Photographs for which you do not hold copyright.

 Permission is not required for:

  • Reconstruction of your own table with data already published elsewhere. Please notice that in this case you must cite the source of the data in the form of either "Data from..." or "Adapted from...".
  • Reasonably short quotes are considered fair use and therefore do not require permission.
  • Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks that are completely redrawn by the authors and significantly changed beyond recognition do not require permission.

Obtaining Permission

In order to avoid unnecessary delays in the publication process, you should start obtaining permissions as early as possible. If in any doubt about the copyright, apply for permission. SEMS cannot publish material from other publications without permission.

The copyright holder may give you instructions on the form of acknowledgement to be followed; otherwise follow the style: "Reproduced with permission from [author], [book/journal title]; published by [publisher], [year].' at the end of the caption of the Table, Figure or Scheme.