Rights and Permissions

• Assignment of copyright |
• Your retained rights as an author |
• Self archiving policy |
• Pre-print archiving |
• Post-print archiving |
• Exempt journals |
• Permissions requests |

Assignment of copyright

It is our policy to ask all contributors to transfer the copyright in their contribution. There are two broad reasons for this:

• ownership of copyright by the journal owner facilitates international protection against infringement of copyright, libel or plagiarism;
• it also ensures that requests by third parties to reprint or reproduce a contribution, or part of it, in either print or electronic form, are handled efficiently in accordance with our general policy which encourages dissemination of knowledge within the framework of copyright.

Click here for a list of Copyright FAQs.

Your retained rights as an author

As an author, you retain many rights and in the following cases you will not need to obtain specific permission, although you should provide the usual acknowledgements regarding copyright and give a full bibliographic reference.

You have the right to:

• reuse figures, illustrations and tables from the Contribution in other work prepared by yourself;
• make copies (without charge) of the Contribution for personal use, including classroom teaching use (but not for inclusion in course pack material for onward sale by libraries and institutions);
• make and distribute copies of the Contribution to colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not commercially or systematically, e.g. via an e-mail list or list serve);
• present the Contribution at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies to the delegates attending the meeting;
• patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the Contribution;
• use the Contribution or any part thereof in a printed compilation of works of the author, such as collected writings or lecture notes (subsequent to publication of the Contribution in the journal);
• prepare other derivative works, to extend the Contribution into book-length form, or to otherwise re-use portions or excerpts in other works authored by you (subsequent to publication of the Contribution in the journal);
• for the author's employer, if the article is a 'work for hire', made within the scope of the author's employment, the right to use all or part of the Contribution for other intra-company use (e.g. training).

NB: the above use of the term 'Contribution' refers to the author's own version, not the final version as published in the Journal.

Self archiving policy

The majority of our journals (see below) now permit authors to archive either a pre-print or a post-print of their article.

Pre-print archiving

A pre-print is the author’s version of the article before peer-review. Prior to acceptance for publication, authors retain the right to make a pre-print of their article available on any of the following: their own personal website; their employer’s website; a free public pre-print server (e.g. RePEc). Authors should clearly state where the article has been submitted, and if the article is accepted, should change the status to ‘accepted by Journal Name’.

Once the article has been published, the author should update the acknowledgement and provide a link to the definitive version on the Palgrave Macmillan website thus:

“This is a pre-print of an article published in [insert journal title XXX here]. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: [insert URL here]”

Post-print archiving

A post-print is defined as a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article.

Authors may upload their post-print to institutional and/or centrally organized repositories, but must ensure that public availability of post-print is delayed until 18 months after first online publication in the relevant journal issue.

An acknowledgement in the following form should be included, together with a link to the definitive version on the Palgrave Macmillan website thus:

“This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in [insert journal title XXX here]. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: [insert URL here]”

Please contact the relevant journal Publishing Manager if you require assistance with the correct online citation details. Contact details are available here.

Exempt journals

The following journals are not covered by this policy, and applications to post material from these journals should be sought from the Rights Manager at rights@palgrave.com:

There is no requirement for authors to seek permission to post material (other than for the excluded journals) provided usage is as per the above conditions.

Please ensure that the conditions of any grant funding you may have received to produce your article do not conflict with our policies. If you require any further advice on this topic, please contact the relevant Publishing Manager.

Permissions requests

For many of our journals, you can process a permissions request to reproduce or reuse text or images online using the Rightslink system. Simply navigate to the Abstract page for the relevant article; if the Rightslink option is available, you will see a link to Request Permission on the right side of the page. Click here and follow the on-screen instructions.

For those articles where the online processing option is not available, please complete the form below: