1. Copyright and Permissions

Until December 2022, most articles published by Discovery Medicine contained the note: "Copyright © Discovery Medicine. All rights reserved". Discovery Medicine retains copyright.

From January 2023, Discovery Medicine will publish articles as open access under the Creative Common CC BY license, and copyright on any open access article published is retained by the author(s). Authors grant any third party the right to use the article freely provided that the author and original source are properly cited.

2. Reproducing Published Material from Other Publishers

It is 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.

If your article makes use of any previously published material (including figures/diagrams, short extracts, or content taken from websites), then written permission should be requested by the authors from the copyright holder who is usually the publisher (for material taken from journal or proceedings articles), website owner/company (for material taken from websites) or the author or their employer (if the work is unpublished). Some publishers will also require that you seek the permission of the original author (you will need to check the terms of the publisher’s permission).

Permission is required when:

Your works published by other Publishers and for which you did not retain copyright.

Substantial extracts from anyone's 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 when:

Reconstruction of your 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 but need referencing.

Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks that are completely redrawn by the authors and significantly changed beyond recognition do not require permission.

The material is available under one of the Creative Commons licences which allows commercial reuse and suits the purpose for which you want to reuse the content.

All necessary permissions have been obtained by providing the actual written permission granted by the copyright owner.

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. Discovery Medicine cannot publish material from other publications without permission.

The copyright holder may give you instructions on the form of acknowledgment 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.

Authors may share their work ahead of submission to Discovery Medicine on repositories or preprint servers (such as arXiv, PeerJ Preprints, OSF, and others), provided that the server imposes no restrictions upon the author's full copyright and re-use rights, and ensure the license of preprint server is compatible with Discovery Medicine.

4. Conferences, Proceedings, and Abstracts

Manuscripts that first appeared as conference papers must be expanded with at least 25% new content if they are to be considered as original work. Authors are required to add a substantial amount of original content in the form of new raw material (experiments, data) or new treatment of old data sets which lead to original discussion and/or conclusions, providing value that significantly exceeds the original conference version.

• Seek permission for reuse of the published conference paper if the author does not hold the copyright (proof of permission should be submitted as supplementary material or sent to the Editorial Office).
• Cite the conference in the references section if applicable.

5. Subscriber Services

For articles published in 2022 and before, please see the link for related subscription information: https://www.discoverymedicine.com/subscriptions/

Updated on 10 January 2023