Open Access Policy

Adhering to the principles of openness and free dissemination of scientific knowledge, all articles published in this journal are made available in open access immediately upon their publication. This means that any user has unhindered and free access to read, download, copy, and distribute these materials without any financial, legal, or technical restrictions.

Authors fully retain copyright to their works but agree to publish them under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The terms of this license allow third parties to freely copy, distribute, adapt, transform, and use the material for any purpose (including commercial), provided that appropriate credit is given to the authors of the original text, the first publication in this journal is cited, and any changes made are indicated. This ensures transparency, high citation rates, and the lawful use of scientific materials.

FAIR DATA POLICY

This policy defines the journal’s requirements regarding the openness of research data, adherence to the FAIR principles, and the reflection of information about datasets in the article metadata. The provisions are aimed at enhancing research transparency, reproducibility of results, and the integration of the journal into the international open science ecosystem.

Regulatory and Conceptual Framework

The policy is based on the FAIR Data Principles, the recommendations of the European Commission on open science, and best practices in research data management.

Definitions

  • Research data — empirical, experimental, observational, statistical, and other data that form the scientific basis (context) of the article.
  • Dataset — a structured collection of data with a separate description, stored in a repository and assigned a persistent identifier (DOI).
  • FAIR data — data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

General Requirements

The editorial board encourages and allows authors to deposit empirical datasets that form the context of the article in open research data repositories. Such datasets must:

  • comply with the FAIR principles;
  • be deposited in a reliable institutional, national, or international repository;
  • have an assigned DOI;
  • be accessible at the time of article publication.

Recommended Repositories

Authors may use recognized international and local research data repositories, including:

  • Zenodo
  • Figshare
  • Dryad
  • Institutional repositories of universities and research institutions;
  • National open data repositories.

Requirements for Article Metadata

The article metadata submitted during the submission process must include information about related datasets:

  • dataset title;
  • repository name;
  • dataset DOI;
  • the total number of datasets associated with the article.

Note: If the research is based on several datasets, the article metadata must indicate the total number of uploaded datasets with the corresponding DOI for each of them.

Access Restrictions

In cases where open access to data is restricted (due to personal data privacy, ethical limitations, or security reasons), the author must:

  • clearly indicate the justified reason for the restriction;
  • provide a general description of the dataset;
  • where possible, provide a depersonalized or aggregated version of the data.

Authors’ Responsibility

Authors are fully responsible for:

  • the accuracy and reliability of the deposited research data;
  • compliance with ethical standards and applicable legislation when publishing data;
  • compliance of the data with the FAIR principles.

Role of the Editorial Board

The editorial board verifies the presence of dataset DOIs and the correctness of their reflection in the article metadata during the preparation of the material for publication.

Archiving and Long-Term Preservation

Depositing research data in specialized repositories that ensure long-term preservation is a mandatory condition for ensuring the reproducibility of scientific results and transparency of the research process.