Copyright and Licensing

The Journal of Medical Sciences (JOMS) is a fully open-access journal published by Sebha University, Libya. This policy sets out who owns the copyright of JOMS articles and how they may be reused.

Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

1. Licence

All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Under this licence, anyone may, without asking permission:

  • Share: copy and redistribute the article in any medium or format;
  • Adapt: remix, transform and build upon the article,

under the following conditions:

  • Attribution (BY): give appropriate credit to the authors, cite the original publication in JOMS with its DOI, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made;
  • NonCommercial (NC): the article may not be used for commercial purposes, that is, for purposes primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation;
  • ShareAlike (SA): anyone who remixes, transforms or builds upon the article must distribute the resulting work under the same licence.

2. Copyright

Authors retain the copyright of their articles without restriction. On acceptance, the corresponding author, on behalf of all authors, grants JOMS a non-exclusive right to publish the article first and to distribute it under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. JOMS does not require authors to transfer copyright.

The landing pages of articles published up to September 2026 display the line "Copyright (c) Journal of Medical Sciences". This line reflects an earlier default setting of the publishing system; JOMS does not claim copyright in those articles, and their authors hold copyright on the same terms as all other authors.

3. What authors may do

  • Reuse all or part of their article in their own future work, including theses, lectures, teaching material and books, with a citation to the original JOMS publication.
  • Deposit any version of their article in institutional or subject repositories, preprint servers, academic networks or personal websites, with no embargo. See the Self-Archiving Policy.
  • Enter into separate, non-exclusive arrangements for distributing the published version, with an acknowledgement of its first publication in JOMS.
  • Grant permission for commercial reuse of their article, since they are the copyright holders.

4. Commercial reuse

Commercial use of JOMS articles, such as reprinting for sale or inclusion in a commercial product, is not covered by the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. Requests should be sent to the corresponding author of the article. The Editorial Office can forward requests through the Contact page.

5. Third-party material

Figures, tables or other material reproduced from other sources are not covered by the article's licence unless the article says so. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce such material, and users must check the original source before reusing it.

6. Metadata

Article metadata, including titles, abstracts, author names and references, are made freely available for harvesting and reuse, including by indexing services, Crossref and the PKP Preservation Network.

7. Journal website

The design, logos and page text of the JOMS website are © Sebha University and are not covered by the article licence.