Licensing Policy

The International Journal of Surgical and Medical Research (IJSMR) is a fully open-access journal committed to ensuring unrestricted global access to high-quality surgical and medical research. All content published in IJSMR is made freely available to readers worldwide without subscription fees or access barriers. To maximize the dissemination, reuse, and impact of scholarly work, the journal publishes all articles under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license, authors retain copyright while granting broad permissions to users. Anyone is permitted to copy, distribute, transmit, adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the published material for any purpose, including commercial use, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original authors. Users must clearly acknowledge the source, provide a link to the license, and indicate whether any modifications were made to the original work. Such attribution must not imply endorsement by the authors or the journal of any derivative work or use.

To ensure transparency and compliance with international open-access standards, licensing information is clearly integrated across all publication formats. On the journal website, each article includes a visible Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license statement and a direct link to the official license terms. In the final published PDF, a permanent licensing statement is displayed on the first page to ensure that reuse conditions remain clear even when the article is downloaded or shared offline. Additionally, licensing metadata is embedded within each article to allow indexing services, databases, and discovery platforms to accurately identify and categorize the work as open access.

In accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) principles, readers are granted unrestricted rights to read, download, copy, share, print, search, and link to the full text of IJOSMR articles, as well as to use them for any lawful purpose without requiring prior permission from the journal or the authors. This ensures that published research is immediately and permanently accessible to clinicians, researchers, educators, policymakers, and the global scientific community.

This Licensing Policy is reviewed periodically to ensure continued alignment with evolving international open-access frameworks, legal standards, and best practices established by organizations such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The policy may be updated as necessary to maintain full compliance with global open-science principles and digital publishing standards.