Licence and copyright agreement
Author’s certification
By submitting a manuscript, the authors certify that they have read and agreed to the following terms:
- The authors are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- The work is original and has not been formally published before (except in the form of an abstract, preprint, or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication has been approved by all the author(s) and by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out, and that the article does not infringe copyright or any other rights by third parties.
- The work does not contain content that is unlawful, abusive, or constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy.
- The authors warrant that they secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere and that they identified such objects with appropriate citations and copyright statements, if applicable, in captions or even within the objects themselves (e.g. copyrights of maps).
- They agree to the following licence and copyright agreement:
Copyright
- Authors retain the copyright of the article. Regarding copyright transfers please see below.
- Authors grant Copernicus Publications an irrevocable non-exclusive licence to publish the article electronically and in print format and to identify itself as the original publisher.
- Authors grant Copernicus Publications commercial rights to produce hardcopy volumes of the journal for sale to libraries and individuals.
- Authors grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its original authors and citation details are identified.
- The article is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Unless otherwise stated, associated published material is distributed under the same licence:
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licenser endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the licence permits.
Notices:
- The licenser cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the licence terms.
- You do not have to comply with the licence for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
- No warranties are given. The licence may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
- The CC BY License, of which 4.0 is the recent version, was developed to facilitate open access – namely, free immediate access to, and unrestricted reuse of, original works of all types.
- Under this liberal licence, authors agree to make articles legally available for reuse, without permission or fees, for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute, or reuse these articles, as long as the author and original source are properly cited. Thus, CC BY facilitates the dissemination, transfer, and growth of scientific knowledge.
- Please read the full legal code of this licence.
Copyright transfers
Many authors have strict regulations in their contract of employment regarding their works. A transfer of copyright to the institution or company, as well as the reservation of specific usage rights, is typical. Please note that in the case of open-access publications in combination with a Creative Commons License, a transfer of the copyright to the institution is possible, as it belongs to the author anyway and is not subject to the publisher.
Any usage rights are regulated through the Creative Commons License. As Copernicus Publications uses the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, anyone (the author, their institution/company, the publisher, as well as the public) is free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work as long as the original author is given credit (see above). Therefore, specific usage rights cannot be reserved by the author or their institution/company, and the publisher cannot include a statement "all rights reserved" in any published paper.
A copyright transfer from the author to their institution/company can be expressed in a special "copyright statement" on the title page of the manuscript, after the abstract and before the introduction. Authors are asked to include the following sentence: "The author's copyright for this publication is transferred to institution/company".
Crown copyright
The licence and copyright agreement of Copernicus Publications respects the Crown copyright. For works written by authors affiliated with the British Government and its institutions, a copyright statement will be included at the end of the publication. Authors are asked to use the following statement, which has been approved by the Information Policy department of The National Archives:
The works published in this journal are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This licence does not affect the Crown copyright work, which is re-usable under the Open Government Licence (OGL). The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License and the OGL are interoperable and do not conflict with, reduce or limit each other.
© Crown copyright YEAR
Reproduction request
All articles published by Copernicus Publications have been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License since 6 June 2017 (see details above) or under its former version 3.0 since 2007. Under these licences the authors retain the copyright. There is no need from the publisher's side to allow/confirm a reproduction. We suggest contacting the authors to inform them about the further usage of the material. In any case, the authors must be given credit. If articles contain figures, maps, or other objects cited by the authors, the individual copyrights and distribution licences must be clarified individually.
