Spectrum of Operational Research (SOR) respects and protects the intellectual property rights of authors, reviewers, editors, and other contributors involved in the scholarly publishing process.
Authors retain the copyright in their published work in accordance with the journal's Copyright and Licensing policy. Detailed provisions concerning copyright ownership, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), reuse, permissions, and third-party material are defined in that policy and are not repeated here.
Manuscripts submitted to SOR, together with associated data, figures, tables, supplementary files, correspondence, peer-review reports, and other unpublished materials, must be treated as confidential during the editorial and peer-review process.
Editors, reviewers, Editorial Board members, Guest Editors, and other individuals who obtain access to unpublished manuscript material through their role with the journal must not use, disclose, reproduce, distribute, appropriate, or exploit such material for personal, academic, professional, commercial, or other purposes without appropriate authorization.
Unpublished ideas, methods, analyses, data, results, models, algorithms, figures, or other intellectual contributions obtained through peer review or editorial handling must not be incorporated into another person's work without the explicit permission of the relevant rights holder and appropriate scholarly attribution where applicable.
Reviewers and editors must respect the intellectual property contained in manuscripts entrusted to them. Confidential manuscript material must not be shared with unauthorized individuals or uploaded to external services where doing so could compromise confidentiality, ownership rights, or the legitimate interests of the authors.
Additional requirements concerning reviewer confidentiality and the use of unpublished manuscript information are provided in the journal's Peer Reviewer Conduct and Intellectual Property policy.
Requirements concerning the use of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies with unpublished manuscripts are provided in the journal's Use of Generative AI and AI-Assisted Tools policy.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that material included in their manuscripts does not infringe the intellectual property rights of third parties.
Where copyrighted or otherwise protected third-party material is reproduced, adapted, or incorporated into a manuscript, authors must ensure that the intended use is permitted by the applicable license, copyright law, other legal exception, or authorization obtained from the relevant rights holder.
Detailed requirements concerning permissions, attribution, reuse, and third-party material are provided in the journal's Copyright and Licensing policy.
Concerns regarding possible unauthorized use, plagiarism, misappropriation, copyright infringement, or other misuse of intellectual property may be reported to the Editorial Office.
Suspected plagiarism or substantial unattributed reuse will be considered under the journal's Plagiarism Policy .
Where a concern may constitute research or publication misconduct, it will be assessed in accordance with the journal's Procedures for Dealing with Allegations of Unethical Behaviour .
Where an established intellectual-property concern affects an article that has already been published, any formal action affecting the scholarly record will be taken in accordance with the journal's Retraction and Correction Policies .
SOR expects all participants in the publication process to respect copyright, authorship, confidentiality, attribution, licensing conditions, and other legitimate intellectual property rights throughout submission, peer review, publication, and post-publication.
