Open Access Policy

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS) provides open access (OA) to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

There are no article processing charges (APC) or submission fees to contribute to and/or read ESTS. Authors of all content published in ESTS retain the copyright to their work, and agree to license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

All papers in ESTS become available immediately upon publication, and readers are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles, and use them for any other lawful purpose, in accordance with the Creative Commons license.

OA is crucial for furthering ESTS’s commitment to transnationalize STS, removing price barriers to participation in the journal community, and enabling other open access journals to republish articles in other languages thereby supporting the OA ecosystem of open access journals in STS and beyond. ESTS is committed to enabling its publications to move beyond the limitations of English language. 

For further information, please refer to Peter Suber’s helpful overview of OA.  

PrePrints

ESTS encourages authors to post preprints of their primary research manuscripts in a variety of ways. For example, an author can choose from preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites to publicly publish a preprint.

Preprints are distinguished from the author’s final publication on account that a preprint is an earlier version of that same research manuscript that has yet to go through the peer review process. Preprints can be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at ESTS. Our policy on posting, licensing, citation of preprints, and communications with the media about preprints of primary research manuscripts is summarized below:

  • Authors should highlight preprints by utilising the metadata of a preprint posting, like the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and licensing terms. If preprints are posted prior to submission to ESTS, identifying information should be provided during the submissions process. If authors post preprints of the manuscript after submitting to ESTS but prior to its publication, authors should inform the managing editor by email. If the manuscript is eventually published in ESTS, it is always the author’s responsibility to ensure that the preprint record is updated. To record correctly, the preprint should be dated with a publication reference, the DOI, and a URL link to the published version of the article on the journal website.

  • Authors may choose any license for the preprint including Creative Commons Licenses.

  • Any media coverage that preprint may garner, will not change or hinder the editorial process. If this arises, the researcher may wish to provide clarity of the stage and timing of the work in relation to it being published and peer-reviewed.

Digital Preservation Policy

ESTS utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of digital preservation and restoration. ESTS backs up all communications which are kept for one year. This includes everything in our database from articles through to peer review correspondence.

Copyright

Authors of all content published in ESTS retain the copyrights to their work, and agree to license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

All papers in ESTS become available immediately upon publication, and readers are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles, and use them for any other lawful purpose, in accordance with the Creative Commons license.

Any claims of copyright infringement should be addressed to the managing editor by email. For legal purposes (for example, establishing intellectual property rights), ESTS considers online publication as constituting public disclosure. ESTS documents the online publication history of the journal.