Open Access Policy

This journal is Open Access, which means it provides immediate free access to its content under the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Users are authorized to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of this journal’s articles without prior permission from the publisher or the author, in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. Reuse of the works is allowed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may consult the informative version and the legal text of the license.

Our journal adheres to the recommendations for implementing Point 39, which amends Article 37 on Open Science of the Spanish Science Law 17/2022:

1. Public agents of the Spanish System of Science, Technology, and Innovation shall promote the dissemination of the results of scientific, technological, and innovation activities, ensuring that research outputs—including scientific publications, data, code, and methodologies—are made available in open access. Free and unrestricted access to results shall be encouraged through the development of institutional or thematic open access repositories, whether proprietary or shared.

2. Public sector researchers or those whose research activities are mostly funded with public funds, and who choose to disseminate their research results through scientific publications, must deposit a copy of the final accepted version for publication and the associated data in institutional or thematic open access repositories, simultaneously with the publication date.

3. Beneficiaries of research, development, or innovation projects mostly funded with public funds must comply at all times with open access obligations as set out in the calls’ rules or grant agreements. Beneficiaries of public grants and subsidies shall ensure that they retain the intellectual property rights necessary to meet open access requirements.

4. Research results available in open access may be used by Public Administrations in their evaluation processes, including the assessment of research merit.

5. The Ministry of Science and Innovation shall facilitate access to open access repositories and their interconnection with similar national and international initiatives, promoting the development of systems that enable this connection. It shall also foster open science within the Spanish Strategy for Science, Technology, and Innovation, recognizing science as a common good and following European recommendations on open science.

In addition to open access—and always with the aim of making science more open, accessible, efficient, transparent, and beneficial to society—the Ministries of Science and Innovation and Universities, each within its scope of action, as well as the Autonomous Communities within their competences, will also promote other initiatives aimed at facilitating free access to and management of research-generated data (open data), in accordance with international FAIR principles(findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). They will develop open infrastructures and platforms, encourage the publication of scientific results in open access, and promote the open participation of civil society in scientific processes, as established in Article 38.

6. The above shall be compatible with the possibility of taking appropriate measures, prior to scientific publication, to protect the rights to research, development, and innovation results, in accordance with national and European regulations on intellectual and industrial property, plant varieties, or trade secrets.

Our journal encourages authors to deposit supplementary material—at least the research data underlying publications—in institutional or thematic open access repositories federated within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

ARTICLE SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION FEES

This journal does not charge fees for the submission of manuscripts or for the publication of articles.