Author rights

Open Access Agreement

Upon submitting an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open accessCreative Commons license (CC-BY). Under the terms of this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. However, the license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and the source of the work. The license ensures that the article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive.

Open access ensures not only the widest dissemination possible, but also the greatest impact, by allowing others to cite, re-purpose, and build upon existing published research.

US Government Authors

Submissions with one or more authors who are United States government employees will be published under a CreativeCommons public domain instrument (CC0), which waives all copyright and related rights to the article to the fullest extent allowed by law

Images and Figures

We ask our authors to take care not to submit manuscripts containing previously published images or figures, unless express, written permission from the copyright holder to republish under a CC-BY or CC0 license (as applicable) has been obtained. Images, video, and other materials previously published under a public domain, CC-BY, or CC0 license do not require such permission to be obtained.