During the Covid-19 crisis we understand that some authors may not have access to equipment to enable electronic return of a scanned, signed Author Publishing Agreement. If this applies to you, please see these FAQs. If you are able, please return the full Author Publishing Agreement as normal.

Before Cambridge can publish a journal article (or any other journal content), we require a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged.

There are several versions of the licence to publish form. To choose the right form, you should ascertain:

• the requirements of your funders or institutions, who may have their own conditions for publications derived from their support
• whether you would like the final version of your article, as published in this journal, to be fully open access (“Gold OA”)*
• if you intend to publish Gold OA, who will cover the costs of publication
• and finally, who owns the copyright in your article. This is usually either the author(s) or their employer(s). In some cases the employer(s) may be governmental or other entities for whom special copyright conditions apply. 

* Note that some versions of articles that are not fully open access may still be shared under this journal’s Green OA policy.

If you are not sure who owns the copyright in your article, it’s a good idea to check your employment contract or speak with your employer about copyright ownership of content you have produced during the course of your employment.

Authors should also ensure that they have all appropriate permissions for third-party material used in their article.

Gold Open Access articles

If you would like the final version of your article to be fully open access, you will need to use one of the two forms in the table below. These will ask you to grant us a non-exclusive licence to publish, so that we have the necessary rights to publish your article. A non-exclusive licence means that the rights needed to publish the paper are granted to the journal owner on a non-exclusive basis, while the ownership of the copyright remains unchanged.

A fundamental principle of open access is that content should not only be accessible, but also freely reusable for the good of research and humanity. We comply with this principle by asking you to select a Creative Commons licence for your article. The CC licence you choose will determine how your article can be shared and re-used by others. You can check which CC licences are offered by which journals in the list available on this page.

For information about Gold OA fees and support, please see this journal’s fees and pricing page.

Select the appropriate form from the table below and return all pages.

Articles that are not Gold Open Access

If you do not intend to make the final version of your article fully open access, please use one of the three forms in the table below. These will ask you to grant us an exclusive licence to publish, so that we have the necessary rights to publish your article. An exclusive licence means that the rights needed to publish the article are granted to the journal owner on an exclusive basis, while the ownership of the copyright remains unchanged.

If your article is not published Gold OA, the ways in which your article can be accessed and re-used will depend on a number of factors. Please consult this journal’s Green OA policy for more information about the rights you retain, and how you may share different versions of your article.

Select the appropriate form from the table below and return all pages.