IFAC-PapersOnLine articles undergo a peer review selection process according to the IFAC rules, and are published in journal format on ScienceDirect (like any other IFAC title). Papers are abstracted and indexed in major databases, including Scopus and Web of Science. However, they recognise IFAC PaperOnLine as “conference proceedings publication” and, therefore, presents it as such.
The copyright of papers submitted to IFAC events before 1 October 2019, belongs to IFAC, and their full texts are publicly available on ScienceDirect. Nevertheless, from that date, the main features of IFAC-PapersOnLine series include:
- Diamond Open Access free of charge both for authors and readers. This means that IFAC pays the open access fee, authors do not have to pay any fee, and all published articles can immediately be accessed and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute.
- Copyright belongs to the authors, while IFAC gets exclusive publication rights. This means that, for open access publishing, the authors grant exclusive publication rights or sublicense commercial use to IFAC, but they retain all patent, trademark and other intellectual property rights (including research data).
- Papers are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) license. This means that articles can be shared in many flexible ways by users.
CC BY-NC-ND license probably requires a more detailed explanation (the full details of the license are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The users of the papers (authors or not, any third party) can copy and distribute the article (not for commercial purposes) provided that the user gives appropriate credit (with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI), provides a link to the license, and that the licensor is not represented as endorsing the use made of the work. In any case, it is not permitted the distribution of the article if it is changed or edited in any way.
Therefore, the authors may share copies of the final published article for individual personal use, utilize the final published article in their own classroom, and share the final published article on public non-commercial sites: author’s personal website, author’s institution website, institutional or funder websites as required. There is no embargo period for such posting.
As stated above, also in these cases all copies of the article should link to the original publication in IFAC-PapersOnline via its DOI and a reference to the CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Additionally, the authors may use the article in a subsequent compilation of their work, or extend it to book length form, or include it in a thesis or dissertation, or otherwise to use or re-use portions or excerpts in other works, for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. In these cases, an acknowledgment for the reused text, figures and tables should be included with the IFAC copyright notice (© 20XX IFAC), and the full citation to the original IFAC-PapersOnline publication (including DOI). Any other use requires permission from IFAC.
