Copyright Ownership

The policy proposed for Journal Marine Services (JMS) is that authors retain copyright in their original articles and grant JMS the non-exclusive right of first scholarly publication, including the ability to identify, disseminate, index, and preserve the version of record. This corresponds to the author-retained-copyright model recorded in the publisher's 2026 DOAJ evaluation materials.

License for Published Articles

JMS adopts the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license for published scholarly content covered by that designation. Under this license, readers may copy, share, redistribute, and adapt the article, including for commercial purposes, provided that proper attribution is given, changes are indicated when applicable, and adaptations are distributed under the same or a compatible ShareAlike license.

The governing license text is available at Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. The journal may not impose additional conditions inconsistent with that license. Materials reproduced under third-party permissions must be identified separately when they are not covered by the article's Creative Commons license.

Author Rights and Repositories

Authors may share their preprints, accepted manuscripts, and published versions in appropriate institutional or subject repositories, subject to any third-party rights that apply. There is no embargo imposed by JMS on sharing its own openly licensed version of record. A deposited version should cite the journal publication and permanent DOI when available.

Publication Records

Each published article should display its copyright holder and license in the PDF and on the article landing page. The OJS copyright notice, author agreement, journal policy, Crossref metadata, and indexer responses should convey the same ownership and licensing terms. An earlier or differently contracted article must not be misrepresented as automatically governed by a subsequent change of policy.

Implementation condition: The publisher should confirm the author agreement and copyright notice for both historical and future JMS articles before activating this text. The wording must represent the legally adopted policy, not only the preferred DOAJ answer.