Open Access, Copyright and Licence
IJF articles accepted on or after 8 September 2026 are made freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
Immediate open access • Authors retain copyright • Prospective licence policyArticles published or contractually accepted before this date remain governed by the copyright and licence notice attached to their own publication record. This policy does not retrospectively relicense third-party rights or earlier author agreements.
What CC BY 4.0 permits
Readers may copy, share, display, distribute, adapt and build upon licensed IJF content for any lawful purpose, including commercial use, provided they give appropriate credit, link to the licence and indicate whether changes were made. Credit must not imply that the authors or IJF endorse the reuse.
Licence text
The complete legal terms and a plain-language summary are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.
Copyright and first publication
Authors retain copyright in their article. On acceptance, authors grant IJF the right of first publication and authorise the journal to identify itself as the original publisher, publish the version of record and distribute it under CC BY 4.0. Authors remain responsible for the originality, permissions and integrity of the work.
Author sharing and repositories
Authors may deposit and share their submitted manuscript, accepted manuscript and published version, subject to identifying the version accurately. Deposited published articles should include the full citation and link to the journal record. Preprints are permitted when disclosed at submission; after publication, the preprint record should be updated with the version-of-record citation.
Third-party content
Material credited to another copyright holder may not be covered by the article's CC BY licence. Authors must obtain permission for third-party tables, figures, scales, photographs or substantial adapted material unless a legal exception clearly applies. The credit line must state any different licence or restriction. A user seeking to reuse excluded material must contact its rights holder.
Integrity of reuse
Adaptations must not distort the source or misrepresent the authors' findings. The CC BY licence does not waive privacy, confidentiality, moral rights, trademark rights, research-ethics duties or restrictions applying to underlying participant-level data. Corrections or retractions remain part of the publication record and should be checked before reuse.
