This site may contain--in addition to original research papers and reports--some material, such as abstracts, full text of journal articles and books, and the SIME database and archives, that are copyright protected. For such material, the submitting authors or other copyright holders retain rights for reproduction or redistribution. All persons reproducing or redistributing this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by the copyright holder. Such protected material, however, may be used under the terms of "fair use"; as defined in the copyright laws, which generally permit use for non-commercial educational purposes such as teaching, research, criticism, and news reporting.

ONE more thing that distinguishes the SIME Journal from most other academic journals and that is the fact that authors are not required to give up exclusive rights in their intellectual work to the publisher. Authors publishing in the SIME Journal retain full but non-exclusive rights in their articles. This grant means that SIME is free to use the article in any manner it sees fit in future publications but the author as well retains this right. Thus, if the author wishes to reproduce the published article for students, post it on a web-page, sell personal copies, or even publish the article a second time with another publisher, the author may do so without obtaining permission from SIME provided that full and appropriate credit for first publication in the SIME Journal is provided in any subsequent electronic or print publications.

 SIME Journal editors believe that science and new knowledge is best advanced through an intellectual environment of openness and freedom to build upon the works of those who came before. Academic scholars and scientists need the freedom to make their ideas, concepts, data, and research results freely and thoroughly accessible through every means possible in order to allow open discussion, critique, and intellectual exchange. This is how knowledge and understanding advance. To this end, we encourage the broadest dissemination of intellectual works and this is ensured through this kind of non-exclusive copyright arrangements.

In return for allowing the retention of author ownership rights in their published articles, the SIME Journal requires that authors not submit their works to other publishers for review while the article is proceeding through the SIME peer-review process. However, the SIME Journal has no objection to the posting of a submitted article on a university, government or non-profit organization web site with the author’s permission while the article is being peer reviewed by SIME. In fact we encourage this action so that your work and ideas may be made available to others in as timely a manner as possible. As such, when you submit an article to the SIME Journal. unless you inform us otherwise, we will typically post the submitted article on the SIME web site under the heading "Articles Currently Under Peer Review by the SIME Journal."

Through submission of articles to academic journals that allow authors substantial retention of rights in their articles, authors help reduce the spiraling high costs of hard copy and electronic academic journals. The high cost of academic journals has become a major problem for university and community libraries across the nation and the world. Due to this innovative new copyright policy, SIME will be allowed to keep the pricing of future hard copy journal reasonable because, if it does not, authors may make their recent works available to libraries and subscribers directly or through competing publishers. Thus a very substantial means for combating the continually rising costs of academic journals is for authors to choose to publish in journals that grant them unbridled future control of their own works.