Open Access Policy
ESTS provides open access to all of its content on the principle that making research freely available supports global knowledge exchange and development. All publications in ESTS become freely available immediately upon publication.
ESTS does not charge article processing charges (APCs) or submission fees to authors, nor does it charge fees of any kind to readers or institutions. Authors retain the copyright to their work and agree to license it under one of the following Creative Commons licenses: CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, or CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. After a manuscript is accepted, authors are asked to specify their preferred licensing options. We can assist authors in choosing a license that complies with funders’ and/or institutional requirements when applicable.
Readers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, or link to the full texts of ESTS publications, and to use them for any other lawful purpose in accordance with the selected Creative Commons license. This includes translating articles or parts of articles into languages other than English with acknowledgement of the original author and that the text previously appeared in English in ESTS.
Open-access data
ESTS encourages prospective authors to consider whether the source data from which their publications draw may also be made openly available. Examples of source data include interview transcripts and recordings, photographs, field notes, or numerical data sets. While STS researchers often work with data that cannot be shared, we invite authors to consider whether their data might be added to STS Infrastructures (STS-I), the platform with which ESTS works for this purpose. Authors are also welcome to share their data via another platform and link this to their publications in ESTS.
Preprints
Authors are encouraged to post preprints of manuscripts that they submit to ESTS, on preprint servers, institutional websites, or their own personal websites. A preprint—defined as a manuscript that has not undergone the journal’s peer-review process—is not considered a prior publication and will not affect the manuscript’s consideration for publication in ESTS.
We ask that authors identify whether and where a manuscript has been posted as a preprint when they submit it to ESTS. If a manuscript is then published in ESTS, authors are responsible for updating the preprint with a note that a peer-reviewed version has been published in ESTS, with a link to the ESTS publication.
Authors are also welcome to share their publications in ESTS via institutional repositories, personal websites, or commercial websites. We only require that the ESTS publication is consistently acknowledged, with a complete citation and a link to the ESTS version.
