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Copyright and permissions


Copyright policy


For all articles published by Portland Press Limited, we ask authors to assign us an exclusive Licence to Publish under which the Author(s) retains copyright. Both subscription and Open Access papers are published by Portland Press Limited under the terms of a Licence to Publish agreement with the Author(s). Portland Press Limited is the Publisher of the articles and is a wholly-owned trading subsidiary of the Biochemical Society.

The Portland Press Licence to Publish forms are available here:


Permissions



In 2022, around 64% of our content was published open access, with just under 90% of this being published under a Creative Commons CC BY license, a more permissive license. Therefore, you may not need to request permission to reuse content if the paper is published open access under a Creative Commons license. Check the copyright statement on the article to see if the article has been published open access, and if so you can reuse this without seeking permissions as long as appropriate acknowledgement is given.

For authors


If your institution is signed up to a Biochemical Society/Portland Press Read & Publish offering, you are able to publish open access with no author-facing charges. See if your institution is signed up here. You will publish open access under a Creative Commons license, either CC BY or CC BY NC-ND depending on the institutional agreement. If you or your institution would like more information about the Read & Publish offering, please contact our Sales Department.

Authors of papers published in a Portland Press journal do not usually need to contact Portland Press to request permission to reuse their own material, as long as the original work is properly credited. It is usual to provide the citation of (and, where relevant, a hyperlink to) the original publication, along the lines of:

This figure [table/extract] was originally published in [insert hyperlinked citation information, including author name(s), journal name, year of publication].”

As long as the original article (or portion of the article) is properly cited and a link to the article is included, Authors retain the following non-exclusive rights:

  1. To reproduce their article in whole or in part in any printed work (book or thesis) of which they are the Author.
  2. To reproduce their article in whole or in part at the Author’s current academic institution for teaching purposes, including course packs.
  3. To re-use figures, tables, illustrations and excerpts of fewer than 300 words from their article in non-commercial works and/or works published by STM publishers where they are the author/creator.
  4. To include their article in whole or in part in their own dissertation or thesis in print or electronic format provided that the full-text article is not then shared in an open repository unless it is published via the Gold Open Access (OA) route.
  5. Authors are permitted to post a copy of their Accepted Manuscript (AM) to their Institutional Repository 12 months after final publication, provided this posting is labelled as a pre-publication manuscript, and provided the posting is hyperlinked (for example, through the DOI) to the final published article [i.e. the Version of Record (VoR)] on the journal website.

Authors of OA articles may post the VoR to their institutional repository. Portland Press will deposit the VoR in PubMed Central on behalf of the author in the case of Gold OA papers.

All Authors are encouraged to reuse their article, in whole or in part, as long as it is not sold or given away in ways which would conflict directly with the Publisher’s business interests. Therefore, without express written permission, Authors are not permitted to:

  1. Post the final version (VoR) of their article to any website that is open to the public; this includes institutional repositories, personal webpages, blogs, listservs, ResearchGate and all other websites that are not password protected.
  2. Distribute their final published article (VoR) in any format via an automated/organized means outside of their current academic institution.
  3. Without separate permission, Authors are not permitted to reuse the whole article (full text of any version) or parts of the article, including figures/tables/excerpts, in commercial and/or sponsored works.

Exceptions to (1) and (2) are where the article is published under a Gold OA route. Please see our open access policy for more information.

Glossary

Accepted Manuscript (AM) – the version of the article that has been accepted for publication and includes the revisions made following peer review. This is not the final published article, but the Authors’ accepted version.

Version of Record (VoR) – the final published article that is available from the journal website after processes such as copyediting, proof corrections, layout and typesetting have been applied.

Please see the NISO/ALPSP guidelines for further information on journal article versions and naming conventions.


Open Access


In 2022, around 64% of content published in our journals was open access, with just under 90% of this being published under a Creative Commons CC BY license, one of the most permissive licenses. Therefore, it may not be necessary for an individual to request permission to reuse content if the paper is published open access under a Creative Commons license. The copyright statement on the article will inform users if the paper has been published open access and under which license type, and reuse is permitted based on this license as long as appropriate acknowledgement is given.

A number of institutions are signed up to a Biochemical Society/Portland Press Read & Publish offering, meaning individuals from that institution can publish open access with no author-facing charges. A list of participating institutions can be found here. If you have any questions about the Read & Publish offering, please contact our Sales Department.


Non-commercial requests


Authors may reproduce an article, in whole or in part, in a thesis or dissertation at no cost providing the original source is attributed.

If you wish to copy and distribute an article as a whole for teaching (e.g. in a course pack), please visit the Copyright Clearance Center, or contact your librarian who will advise you on the options available.  

Organizations who have charitable or not-for-profit status are usually able to reuse Portland Press content without charge; however, we do ask that you please write to the Production Team in the first instance.


Commercial requests


For any form of commercial reuse, including requests to use content at sponsored symposia/lectures, sponsored medical education activity, republication of material by non-STM-signatory publishers and for any other requests not covered elsewhere on this page, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center, select the journal and follow the steps to obtain the relevant permission.


Sharing and public posting of articles


Portland Press endorses and supports the ‘Voluntary principles for article sharing’ compiled by the STM Association.

Portland Press encourages the public posting of Open Access articles and article metadata and in scholarly collaboration networks and elsewhere online.

Sharing of subscription/licensed articles within research collaboration groups is allowed and encouraged as long as such groups are scholars or researchers invited to participate in specific research collaborations that would:

  • Be of the size that is typical for research groups of that discipline;
  • Only share articles within and for the purposes of the group;
  • Allow article sharing between subscribers and non-subscribers within the group;
  • Include commercial researchers, subject to publisher policy or appropriate licensing;
  • Include members of the wider public participating for the purposes of the group.
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