The Sapienza Online Journals service - Riviste Online SApienza (R.O.SA) - promotes knowledge and the application of the principles of Open Science within the Sapienza University of Rome community and, in particular, among the eJournals’ Editorial Staffs participating in the service, supporting university guidelines defined in the Sapienza Policy for Open Access (Rectoral Decree no. 699/2020).
Therefore, the R.O.SA service policy on copyright and open access is described below.

Open Access

The R.O.SA eJournals are set up as fully open access and publish previously accepted contributions in Open Access directly, without embargo periods (OA Gold road). R.O.SA eJournals do not charge the authors for any processing and publication costs (article processing charge – APC).
Readers are not required to register in order to read and download published papers.
The e-publishing platform adopted by the R.O.SA service complies with the standards for web content interoperability set by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

License of publication

As determined by Sapienza Università Editrice’s Scientific Editorial Board on May 28, 2021, starting from January 1, 2022:

• all R.O.SA eJournals must publish papers under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0);
• the copyright of any paper is to be retained by the Author(s), who grants the eJournals the exclusive right to the first publication of the unpublished paper.

The publication license of papers published until December 31, 2021 will be automatically converted to the new CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license if the rightsholder is the journal and/or Sapienza Università Editrice and the license previously applied is more restrictive. Service managers, together with the eJournals’ Editorial Staffs, commit to thoroughly informing the authors regarding this retroconversion in order to facilitate the alignment of information.
Previously published papers whose rights are retained by authors or that have been released under a more open Creative Commons license are not subject to retroconversion.

Self-archiving

The R.O.SA eJournals ensure the authors their right to self-archive their own papers in all their versions.
Authors are strongly encouraged to upload their papers in institutional repositories; for broader dissemination, authors are also encouraged to upload them in disciplinary or multidisciplinary repositories qualified as 'open access repositories'.

Rights management

Rights on papers published in R.O.SA eJournals are regulated by the license of publication defined by Sapienza Università Editrice (SUE).
The license of publication is adopted by the R.O.SA eJournals and signed by authors following the notification of acceptance for publication and prior to online publication, compliant with Italian Copyright law.
By signing the license of publication, authors also assume responsibility for the content of the contribution, relieving the journals from any liability arising from the violation of the moral and/or property rights of third parties.
The license of publication is available on the website of each journal and authors accept its contents when submitting manuscripts.

Print-only journals

Print-only journals participating in the R.O.SA service display their metadata on the e-publishing platform. These journals may decide to provide open access to their contents after an embargo period defined by each journal, in accordance with Sapienza Università Editrice.
Print-only journals are the rightholders of published papers; papers published online after an embargo period are released under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license.

Last update: January 1, 2021