Policies

All LPS websites should maintain AA compliance of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. LPS sites may also be required to meet compliance under the University Digital Accessibility Policy. University best practices can be found on the CMS Web Accessibility page. You can read more about WCAG standards and methods of evaluation on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.

Although we seek to utilize platforms and technologies that make our hosted content available to all, we recognize that accessibility and inclusivity require constant adjustments and improvement. If you notice any accessibility concerns when accessing a LPS site, please contact us; we will work with the CMU Digital Accessibility Office to address these issues as our highest priority.

All projects published by the LPS must have an active affiliation to CMU through a campus unit, organization, or individual member. This affiliation must be clearly defined in the application for LPS services.

Student-led projects (undergraduate and graduate alike) must be sponsored by at least one member of the CMU faculty, staff, or administration. (Two or more faculty/staff advisors are recommended.) If the advisor changes, this must be communicated to LPS, and relevant contact information updated.

Students-led projects using the Carnegie Mellon name are required to consult with the Media Relations Department, as per the student handbook. Likewise, university-sanctioned student publications must be approved by the Office of the Dean of Students, and include the official CMU watermark and Statement of Assurance; refer to the student handbook for details.

All creators must agree to license their content under a Creative Commons license, or similar recognized open and public license. Editors and project directors may identify specific open licenses available within the scope of their respective publications, and these should be displayed on both the publication’s own policies page, as well as directly alongside content (e.g. individual articles). Making any relevant project code open source is strongly encouraged.

Creators retain copyright of their work. Creators grant the University Libraries nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, translate, transmit all metadata and full content of hosted works, in any physical or electronic medium now known or hereafter developed; and to convert the content into any format for the purposes of preservation.

Creators’ contributions should be acknowledged accordingly on public-facing components of all digital projects - this includes both project roles/titles as well as documentation of individual contribution wherever possible. Correction notices are suggested protocol for author-requested post-publication name changes.

Creators are responsible for the content that they submit and publish. This includes ensuring appropriate citation or credit when the work of others is referenced, and warranting that their work does not do not constitute defamation or invasion of the right of privacy or publicity or any other rights of third parties. Creators and contributors to LPS publications also shall defend, indemnify, and hold harmless any editors and project managers, as well as Carnegie Mellon University and its officers, trustees, agents, and employees, from all liability arising from their work.

Refer also to the University Libraries resources on Copyright and Fair Use, and the CMU policy statement on Fair Use.

Editors and project managers are responsible for confirming that creators producing content for their publications are aware of and agree to follow the above policies.

CMU Privacy Notice details can be found on the University Legal site.

Third Party Services are governed by their own privacy policies. We recommend you review the Privacy Notice governing any Third Party Services before using them.

Limited data may be collected by LPS for four purposes:

• Any time the LPS is contacted via email or our contact form (e.g. sender’s email address)
• For registration and log-in of LPS-supported platforms (e.g. name, email address, and country)
• To monitor our infrastructure for bugs or security issues
• And the use of non-intrusive cookies to anonymously track readership

If you have any concerns about the above, contact us to discuss any data we may have about you. You have the right to withdraw your consent to our use of this data. The Right to Erasure may not apply to authors of a submitted work — it is necessary for us to retain identifying data to recognize you as the author of a published and indexed text.

Data from creators and contributors is only shared for the purposes of publication. The LPS respects that unpublished manuscripts and content are a creator’s private, confidential property. Names, contact information, and content entered on LPS sites will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of the respective publication and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party. Editors, project managers, and any relevant project staff are required to keep information confidential, sharing only information internally only as is necessary for the evaluation, review, and publication process. No content will be discussed publicly prior to acceptance and publication without the content creator’s approval.

Policies regarding blind review are outlined by individual publications. Review individual journal sites for details.

Janeway uses two cookies, one for sessions and one for tracking views and downloads and we don’t store any information about anonymous views/downloads as we use the cookie’s uuid rather than the users IP. Cookies are used for maintenance of login sessions, for security (prevention of CSRF), and for tracking readership using the COUNTER method.

The Janeway platform in use for all LPS journals automatically flags the submission of articles by editorial board members, prompting author-editors to recuse themselves from involvement in the review process. Full public transparency of such conditions, and any other conflict of interest within the context of scholarly publishing, is encouraged for all LPS publications.

CMU values the freedoms of speech, thought, expression and assembly - in themselves and as part of our core educational and intellectual mission. However, members of our community, in exercising their freedoms, must respect the rights of others. See at length CMU policies on Freedom of Expression, and Academic and Individual Freedom.

Editors and project managers have full authority over the content of their publications. The LPS is not involved in or responsible for the evaluation, evaluation, selection, scheduling, or editing of individual pieces of content (e.g. articles). The LPS requires its editors and project managers base the editorial decisions on the validity of content submitted, and an evaluation of its importance as scholarly work.

LPS requires that all published work undergo editorial review. Peer-review is strongly encouraged. All publications must display their review policy.

See also the LPS Ethics statement.

LPS strongly encourages its publications to follow the core practices and guidelines established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for scholarly literature.

Editors and project managers shall not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, ethnicity, or geographical origin of authors.

In 2020, Carnegie Mellon created an expansive three-pillared action plan to confront racism and promote equity and inclusion across the university and within the communities it serves. This work continues at Carnegie Mellon under the guidance of appointed academic and administrative Inclusive Excellence Leaders. For more on university initiatives, see CMU’s commitment to Inclusive Excellence.

For more on resources within the University Libraries, refer to the DEI Libguide.

The LPS also refers its editors and authors to the "Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images" set forth by the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications.

LPS supports and encourages the use of long-term preservation services by its various publications.

For journals that lack institutional funding sources and have already been accepted into the DOAJ, LPS will provide support in the application for and (if accepted into the program) management of JASPER, a free preservation program for Diamond Open Access journals. JASPER utilizes the preservation platforms of CLOCKSS and Internet Archive.

For journals exclusively publishing work by CMU affiliates (i.e. authors are current faculty, staff, or students), journal editors may use CMU’s own institutional repository, KiltHub. Please contact LPS and CMU’s Institutional Repository Specialist for details.

Other means of preservation currently under discussion.

Long-term Preservation: Self-Archiving policy

Authors are encouraged to deposit a copy of the final published article in their respective institutional repository or any suitable subject repository upon publication. Authors should link from the deposited version to the article's DOI on the journal’s website, to identify this version as the definitive version of record. Some of our journals also encourage authors to deposit earlier versions of work (i.e. full-text preprints). Some journals may choose to institute a minor embargo (no longer than one year) for exclusive right to first publication. Review individual journal sites for details.

All content published by the LPS is full Diamond Open Access immediately upon publication, and will remain as such in perpetuity: that is, no fees to either authors or readers are to be charged at any time.

All supported platforms under the LPS have technical mechanisms to facilitate content changes after initial publication. All publications must define guidelines for correcting, revising, and/or retracting content after publication, and must display the terms of these guidelines. Notation of corrections, revisions, and retractions to scholarly content must be displayed upon publication of the change.

For bespoke digital projects, new versioned releases should be comprehensive and planned. Webpages should display the date of publication and identify the active version, for unambiguous citation of a specific edition. A log of versions, dates, and major content changes should be made available publicly.

Following the University Libraries’ policy on deaccession, the LPS reserves the right to review digital projects for deaccession. Sunsetting policies and workflows are to be determined upon intake of all new LPS projects, and are to be followed in any instance of deaccession. Additional reasons for evaluation outside of those terms listed below might include: availability of the material from alternative sources (see also the LPS Transfer/migration policy); a sudden change to cost of storage space for digital materials; concern over client reputation or business practice. If the project can no longer be hosted by the LPS, the Carnegie Mellon University Archives reserves the right to retain a copy of the project in accordance with their collection policy.

For standalone single-product digital projects (e.g. book, exhibition, etc.) using a standard LPS-supported platform, LPS agrees to maintain the project in its initial as long as the platform remains stable and secure, on a three-year cycle; renewal of publication agreements every three years from date of signing is subject to reviewing the agreement and signing by involved parties. See also the Orphaned projects policy below.

In the case of any major destabilizing change to the software for projects using standard LPS-supported platform during a given three-year renewal period, the LPS takes responsibility for either making modifications to the platform’s setup or migrating the content to a new platform, with the intention to keep the project publicly accessible at least until the agreement is up for renewal. 

Serial publications are considered active if they produce an issue, or equivalent, during the course of a 12-month period. If a serial publication does not meet this requirement, it will be considered inactive; LPS will issue a warning to the current editors (and in the case of student publications, all advisors on record), with 90 days to respond. If the publication remains inactive, and/or contactees are unresponsive, the LPS reserves the right to end their partnership with the publication. At this time, the sunsetting arrangements put into place during publication onboarding will be initiated.

Likewise, if the LPS discovers that any client’s policies contradict those outlined here, or falls out of compliance with the terms agreed during onboarding documentation, LPS will issue a warning with 90 days to respond; following this 90 day period with no resolution of the issues identified, or no response, the LPS reserves the right to end their partnership with the publication. At this time, the sunsetting arrangements put into place during publication onboarding will be initiated.

If a client wishes to end its publishing relationship with the LPS, or alter the terms of their agreement, they must provide the LPS with 90 days notice via email. Receipt of the email will initiate the relevant sunsetting workflow, transfer plan, etc., as designated in onboarding documents. 

Sunsetting/deaccession policy: Orphaned projects policy

LPS expects that all digital projects will be maintained by project team members identified in the publication onboarding documentation. If team members leave/join, LPS is to be identified of the contact changes at earliest convenience. In the case of a digital project being “orphaned” by any actively involved, sufficiently trained team members that might be able to conduct necessary maintenance of the project site, the LPS will issue a warning to all known past contacts for the project, with six months to resolve. If no resolution is reached within that period, and the project remains orphaned, sunsetting arrangements put into place during publication onboarding will be initiated.

LPS uses open, non-proprietary standards for the content on its supported publishing platforms, allowing for content to be easily transferred to archives and other publishers. All of our article XML is compliant with the Journal Archiving Tag Suite (JATS) schema, and we follow the NISO Transfer Code of Practice to ensure that all parties are informed and treated fairly.

When an LPS-hosted publication ceases production, its past works will continue to be made available as open access publications.

If the publication moves to a new publisher, creators maintain their rights to previously published content as outlined in the Author and creator rights, and copyright policy. The LPS retains the nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, translate, transmit all metadata and full content of work previously published by the LPS, in any physical or electronic medium now known or hereafter developed. Continued preservation and hosting of previously published content of the transferred journals will occur at the discretion of LPS.