Open Access Policy

UTHM Publisher is committed to the principle of open access and aims to disseminate high-quality research freely and globally to support the exchange of knowledge and ideas.

1. Open Access Definition

All articles published in this journal are freely accessible immediately upon publication. There are no subscription fees or registration requirements for readers to access, read, download, copy, distribute, print, or link to the full texts of the articles.

This journal defines open access in alignment with the Budapest Open Access Initiative and complies with the DOAJ's definition of open access.

2. Licensing

All articles published in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

This means:

  • Attribution (BY): Users are free to share and adapt the material, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided, and any changes are indicated.

  • NonCommercial (NC): The material may not be used for commercial purposes.

  • ShareAlike (SA): If the material is remixed, transformed, or built upon, the resulting work must be distributed under the same license as the original.

More information about this license is available here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

3. Author Retention of Copyright

Authors retain the copyright of their work. Upon acceptance and publication, authors grant the journal the right to publish and disseminate the article under the aforementioned Creative Commons license.

4. Self-Archiving Policy

Authors are allowed to deposit all versions of their article (submitted, accepted, and published) in institutional repositories, subject-based repositories, or personal websites. No embargo period is applied.

We encourage authors to include a DOI link to the official published version for citation integrity.

5. Interoperability and Indexing

Metadata of all published articles is openly available and structured to enable harvesting via OAI-PMH. The journal is in-line with DOAJ and strives to meet all technical and editorial standards of high-quality open access publishing.

6. Policy Review

This policy is reviewed regularly to ensure alignment with international open access standards and the evolving requirements of indexers such as DOAJ.