< Submission Guidelines

Permissions & Licensing

All uncited data, text, or images published in a JEI manuscript must NOT be published in any other academic journal, conference proceedings, or any other publication under copyright. Legally, we are unable to accept work that has been or is intended to be submitted for publication at competitions, pre-prints, or other journals without clear and publicly stated copyright licenses/permissions from these competitions/publishers.

Additionally, if work was performed in a research lab with government funding (typically at a university) you MUST make sure you have the permission of the head of the lab to publish the work.

JEI Copyright and Licensing

All manuscripts at JEI are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you and others to share or reference your work for noncommercial uses as long as they give proper credit to you as the original author.

What Does CC-BY-NC-ND Mean for You as an Author?

At JEI, we believe students' work should be easy to share and learn from, but also protected from plagiarism and copyright infringement. CC-BY-NC-ND lets your preprint be part of the scientific community while protecting your authorship.

By using CC-BY-NC-ND:

  • You are the copyright holder of your manuscript, including the text and the data.
  • People can share your preprint or parts of it for non-commercial reasons but must give you credit by citing your work.
  • Your full article cannot be published anywhere else after it is published at JEI.

Why does JEI use CC-BY-NC-ND, but eiRxiv uses CC-BY?

JEI and eiRxiv serve different roles in the scientific community, so they use different Creative Commons licenses

  • JEI (CC-BY-NC-ND): Articles published in JEI are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND). This license allows articles to be shared freely with appropriate credit, but they cannot be changed, reused in other publications, or used commercially. JEI articles use this license because they are peer-reviewed, finalized scientific records that may not be published again elsewhere.
  • eiRxiv (CC-BY): Preprints posted on eiRxiv are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY). This means others are free to share, reuse, and build on your preprints as long as they give credit to the author. Authors can revise and submit their full or partial manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal or other publisher after it has been posted on eiRxiv. Many scientific journals these days accept previously-posted preprints or abstracts for formal publication, but only if the preprint/abstract uses this less restrictive CC-BY license.

Can I submit the same manuscript to JEI and to another journal at the same time?

No. You may only submit the same manuscript to one journal at a time.

Many journals will remove a manuscript from the review process, no matter how far along it is, if it is discovered the manuscript was submitted to multiple journals at once. Journals also have the right to ban authors from submitting future manuscripts with them in these cases.

Submitting your manuscript to multiple journals at once puts you and the journal at risk of copyright infringement. In addition, when you submit a manuscript at JEI, our volunteers donate dozens of hours of their personal time to review your work and help you improve it. Submitting your work at multiple journals disrespects this effort and wastes volunteer time.

Can I submit the same manuscript to JEI and to a preprint?

If you are going to submit your manuscript to a preprint, we recommend submitting to the preprint before you submit to JEI. This allows you to incorporate any feedback you get on your preprint into the manuscript you submit to JEI. However, please check the preprint’s copyright terms. JEI can only accept previously published preprints if their copyright clearly allows for future publication or adaptation (CC-BY, for example).

JEI manuscripts cannot be submitted to a preprint after they have entered scientific review at JEI. Doing so violates the CC-BY-NC-ND copyright agreement for your JEI manuscript.

If you have submitted to a preprint, please declare this during your submission so we can work with the preprint to link the two DOIs. By linking the DOIs this allows individuals who find your preprint to be able to easily see your published manuscript.

Can I publish my manuscript or parts of it somewhere else after publishing with JEI?

No. Your manuscript will be copyrighted through JEI and therefore your manuscript, data, and text cannot be published anywhere else. You and everyone else are free to cite the article, though!

Can I share my manuscript on social media or with friends and family?

Absolutely! Since your preprint is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND, you can share it anywhere as long as you give credit to all of the authors and do not use it to make money. We recommend linking to your DOI.

If your work has been published elsewhere and you are unsure whether submitting to JEI would violate copyright restrictions, please contact us.