Before Cambridge can publish a journal article (or any other journal content), we require a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged.

All articles in this journal are published Gold Open Access. A fundamental principle of open access is that content should not only be accessible, but also freely reusable for the good of research and humanity. We comply with this principle by asking you to select a Creative Commons licence for your article. The CC licence you choose will determine how your article can be shared and re-used by others. You can check which CC licences are offered by this journal on the open access options page.

For information about Gold OA fees and support, please see this journal’s fees and pricing page.

We also ask you to grant a non-exclusive licence to publish, so that we have the necessary rights to publish your article, using one of the forms in the table below. A non-exclusive licence means that the rights needed to publish the paper are granted to the journal owner on a non-exclusive basis, while the ownership of the copyright remains unchanged.

To choose the right form, you should ascertain:

• the requirements of your funders or institutions, who may have their own conditions for publications derived from their support
• who will cover the costs of publication
• and finally, who owns the copyright in your article. This is usually either the author(s) or their employer(s). In some cases the employer(s) may be governmental or other entities for whom special copyright conditions apply.

If you are not sure who owns the copyright in your article, it’s a good idea to check your employment contract or speak with your employer about copyright ownership of content you have produced during the course of your employment.

Authors should also ensure that they have all appropriate permissions for third-party material used in their article.

Select the appropriate form from the table below and return all pages.