Mamlūk Studies Review
The Middle East Documentation Center at The University of Chicago
OPEN ACCESS
Mamlūk Studies Review is an open access publication. We believe that free and open access to scholarship benefits everyone.
Open Access means that users, whether individual readers or institutions, are able to access articles and other content in MSR at no charge. All content published in MSR will be immediately and permanently free for anyone to read, download, copy, print, or distribute, with some restrictions.
Creators and Authors
All content published in MSR is copyrighted and each author of content published in Mamlūk Studies Review retains the copyright to his or her work. By licensing it under the Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY), the author explicitly grants anyone permission to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, use, or link to the full text of the article, as long as users properly cite the article’s author(s) as defined in the license, section 3(a)(1).
Creators benefit from using a Creative Commons license on scholarly work. Such a license serves to increase the work's potential audience (as opposed to limiting access to only certain formats or requiring that readers must pay before reading), makes sure that the creator of the work will always be given proper credit, and allows the creator of the work to do whatever he or she wishes with the work in the future (which would not be the case if a creator gave a publisher exclusive rights and/or transferred copyright).
Readers and other Users
If you use (in any way) or share work published in MSR, you must include the following (all of which already exists in the PDF of each article, so please share the PDF if at all possible):
• The name(s) of the author(s) and a citation identifying MSR as the original publisher of the material
• The copyright notice
• Notice of the Creative Commons license
• A link to the work (the mamluk.uchicago.edu URL provided on each page of the PDF)
The author and MSR request that any use of the content is not commercial in nature.
The CC BY 4.0 license in brief is at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
For the full legal description, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
Authors must agree to license their work in this way in order to publish in MSR. See Agreement, below.
AGREEMENT
Memorandum of Understanding between Mamlūk Studies Review and Contributing Authors
Mamlūk Studies Review is an open access publication. We believe that free and open access to scholarship benefits everyone.
When you publish your work in MSR,
1. You, as the creator of the work, retain full ownership and copyright in perpetuity.
2. You agree to license your work under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) license. This means that you permit anyone to read, download, share or otherwise use the article, and that you can not revoke those permissions, while requiring that anyone who uses the material gives you full credit as the creator of the work and cites MSR as its original publisher.
3. You certify that the work submitted for publication in MSR is your original work and contains no plagiarism, falsification or other research misconduct.
You certify that all illustrations, maps, photographs, and other materials that accompany your work are either your own intellectual property, used with the permission of the copyright owner, or in the public domain. Items which do not meet such criteria cannot be published.
4. You certify that the work has not previously been published.
5. You grant MSR the non-exclusive* right to publish your work, and further grant MSR the right of first publication. You agree not to allow any other publisher to publish the work before it is published in MSR.
6. Your agreement with MSR is non-exclusive.* You may arrange for additional non-exclusive* distribution of the version of the work published in MSR (i.e., the formatted PDF distributed on the MSR website) such as posting it to your own website, placing it in an institutional repository, or publishing it in a book, with acknowledgment that it was originally published in MSR.
(*Granting a publisher exclusive rights to publish your work is equivalent to forfeiting the right to publish it yourself thereafter.)
7. You grant MSR the right to enter into agreements with organizations or services (such as databases or repositories) that disseminate scholarly work for free or to paid subscribers, if the editors believe doing so is in the best interest of MSR and scholarship in general. You grant MSR the right to produce and make available for sale printed volumes of the journal, including your article, if the editors so choose.
8. You understand that while you, as its owner, can always do anything you wish with your work, you can never revoke the license applied to it. The version of your article published in MSR under the CC-BY license will always carry that license. You may apply whatever license you like to future versions of the work.
It is assumed that by submitting your work for publication in MSR you agree to the points outlined above. If you do not agree, you must notify the editor as soon as possible, since we will be unable to publish your work.
Email: Marlis J. Saleh, msaleh@uchicago.edu
Mailing address: Marlis J. Saleh, Mamlūk Studies Review, Regenstein Library Rm 560, 1100 E. 57th St., Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Further Information
For more information about our Open Access policies, please see MSR's Editorial and Style Guide.
The following editorial was published in MSR Vol. XVIII (2014-15):
Open Access and Copyright
MSR has been published online as an Open Access journal since 2009 (Vol. XIII, No. 1), which means that all new and back issues are freely available online as PDF files. We believe that free and open access to scholarship benefits everyone. As the Open Access movement has evolved, however, it has become clear that we must clarify our policies—for our readers and our authors—in order to comply with accepted best practices that make Open Access effective.
To be truly Open Access, content published in MSR must be immediately, completely, and perpetually free for anyone to read, download, copy, print, or distribute. To that end, all our content will now be copyrighted using a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) license.
A Creative Commons license is a legal device that helps creators retain their copyright (indeed, like the typical “all rights reserved” copyright usually seen on published material, it is a form of copyright) and make their work more readily available to the world, free from barriers. Like any license, including the more restrictive forms of copyright, a CC license makes it clear what rights the public has and what rights are reserved to the creator of the work. Thus, it protects the interests of everyone involved. The licenses are widely used, including by many influential journals, and are legally sound and unambiguous.
This sort of licensing does nothing to weaken an author’s ownership of his or her work, and our authors do not lose anything because of this change. In fact, authors stand to benefit. Publishing scholarly work under a license that explicitly gives anyone the right to use it—as long as they properly cite its creator and MSR—serves to increase its potential audience (as opposed to limiting readership to only those with access to certain formats or requiring that readers must pay before reading) and is good for authors and readers. It makes sure that authors will always be given credit for their work, and allows them to do whatever they want with their work in the future (which is not the case when an author gives a publisher exclusive rights and/or transfers copyright to the publisher).
Readers benefit from unrestricted access to scholarship. Licensing our publication in this way guarantees that neither author nor publisher can close off access to the work in the future. The work we publish in MSR will always be universally accessible.
The wording of our copyright statements will now make explicit what we have always understood: that each author owns the copyright to his or her work and is granting MSR the right to publish it. Our commitment to provide our authors with a high quality platform for their work, and to provide our readers with the best scholarship in the world, is unchanged.
With all of this in mind, and to avoid any misunderstandings, we have created a Memorandum of Understanding to which all authors must agree before we can publish their work. It is available on our website (http://mamluk.uchicago.edu). We have also updated our Editorial Statement and Style Guide, which is also available on our site.
Finally, we consider this change in copyright policy to apply retroactively to all previously published content since the journal’s first issue (in 1997), since all back issues have been freely available online since 2009 (thus Open Access in practice, if not explicitly in policy). Though older issues state that the copyright belongs to the Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC) at The University of Chicago, we want to make it clear that each article is the property of its author(s).
Please contact me if you have questions about these changes to our policies.
I am confident that our mission to promote scholarship on the Mamluks will be enhanced. I hope that ever greater access to such scholarship will serve to attract scholars, including those of our current peers who might discover in the Mamluks a new area of interest and, even more importantly, the future scholars who will one day find and edit the manuscripts, analyze the sources, write the articles, and publish this and other journals.
Marlis J. Saleh, Editor
Mamlūk Studies Review is an Open Access journal. All content is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) license. See the Open Access page for more information.
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