GMJ Adopts New Copyright Policy and Provides Language Services for the Authors

Abstract

After having a discussion on copyright rights and the rules in Galen medical journal, the Editorial board of GMJ decided that a small medical journal has no need to hold the copyright, though transferring the copyright to the publisher is still a common inquiry in many journals. GMJ wants nothing more than being able to publish articles at first and nothing more. In this regard, the GMJ has changed its copyright policy. We believe this alteration is more author-friendly and could result in further dissemination of knowledge in part, because it lets readers to freely explore within the published papers and data.
 From January 2013, authors will retain the copyright and will only be asked to grant us the right to be the first to publish their article. The new copyright policy is as follows; these are now included in our Instructions for Authors:
  
 Authors who publish with The GMJ agree to the following terms: 
 a. Authors retain copyright and grant The GMJ the exclusive license and right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which allows the work to be freely used, distributed, and built upon for non-commercial reasons, as long as proper attribution to the work's authorship and initial publication in the GMJ is given.
 b. Authors are permitted to distribute the GMJ's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in the GMJ.
  
 Language services for the authors
 Since we have had many linguistic problems with the articles which are submitted by many of our authors, we decided to provide language services for instructing and editing of the papers submitted in the GMJ. In this regard, our language editors are prepared to give a hand to the submitters who are not able to provide a good and acceptable language editing for their manuscripts. Obviously this will cost the authors but we tried to have cost-benefit offers since our main goal is to improve the quality of our papers and shorten the peer review duration rather than the economical purposes. Authors can email their paper’s editor and ask for the service and receive the forms for Language services including editing, translating, and scientific preparations.
  
 The Editorial Board has tried to make the policies and instructions for authors simple and clear and is looking forward to a better and more successful future, thanks to our authors, readers, and reviewers.