Copyright Statements

The Synergy: Journal of Outcome-Based Community Engagement is deeply committed to the principles of open knowledge. We believe that authors should maintain control over their intellectual property while ensuring their outcome-based community service models can be widely accessed and applied.

1. Copyright Retention Without Restrictions

Authors who publish with The Synergy agree to the following terms regarding intellectual property:

  • Authors retain the copyright of their manuscript completely and without any restrictions.
  • Authors grant the journal the right of first publication.
  • The journal does not require authors to transfer their copyright to the publisher. The publisher simply acts as the disseminator of the scholarly work.

2. Licensing Policy (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In alignment with open-access principles, all articles published in this journal are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). This means that anyone (including the authors) is legally free to:

  • Copy, distribute, and transmit the work.
  • Adapt and build upon the material (even for commercial purposes).
  • Condition: Appropriate credit must be given to the original authors and The Synergy journal, and any derivative works must be distributed under the exact same CC BY-SA license.

Self-Archiving & Repository Policy

Authors are permitted and highly encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories, academic networks like ResearchGate, or on their personal websites) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges and earlier citations.

When archiving the published version of the article (post-print/publisher's version), authors must clearly provide a citation link referencing the original publication on The Synergy OJS website, utilizing the official DOI (Digital Object Identifier) assigned to the article.