Copyright & License

1. Copyright and Permissions

From January 2023, Discovery Medicine will publish articles as open access under the CC BY 4.0 license, and copyright on any open access article published is retained by the author(s). Authors grant any third party the right to use the article freely provided that the author and original source are properly cited.

2. Reproducing Published Material from Other Publishers

Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission from the copyright holder if their article includes any previously published material (such as figures, schemes, tables, or excerpts of text) that is not in the public domain and for which they do not hold the copyright. The copyright holder is typically the publisher (for material from journals or conference proceedings), the website owner or company (for material from websites), or the author(s) or their employer (for unpublished work).

Permission is not required in the following cases:

Reasonably short quotes that qualify as fair use.
Material available under a Creative Commons license that permits the intended reuse.
Graphs, charts, schemes, or artworks that have been completely redrawn and substantially modified by the authors so that they are no longer recognizable as the original.
Tables that have been reconstructed using data already published elsewhere (in this case, the source must be clearly cited as “Data from…” or “Adapted from…”).

Discovery Medicine cannot publish any material from other sources without proper permission. To avoid delays in the publication process, authors should begin obtaining permissions as early as possible. When in doubt, permission should be sought.

The copyright holder may specify the form of acknowledgment. If no specific instruction is provided, authors should use the following format at the end of the relevant table, figure, or scheme caption:

“Reproduced with permission from [Author], [Book/Journal Title]; published by [Publisher], [Year].”

3. Preprint

Authors must disclose any preprint of their manuscript that has already been posted to a preprint server (such as arXiv, PeerJ Preprints, OSF, and others) when submitting to Discovery Medicine, including the DOI and licensing terms. Authors are required to ensure that the preprint does not impose any restrictions on their full copyright or reuse rights, and that the license agreement of the preprint server is fully compatible with the journal’s policies.

During the peer review process, authors must not upload, update, or modify the manuscript under consideration to any preprint platform. Once the manuscript is formally published, authors are responsible for promptly updating the preprint record to include the formal publication details, such as the standard journal citation, DOI, and the URL link to the final published article on the journal’s official website.

Please note that preprints are subject to the same rigorous peer review and editorial process as regular submissions.

4. Conferences

Manuscripts that have previously appeared as conference papers must be substantially expanded with at least 30% new content to be considered as original work for Discovery Medicine. Authors are required to add a significant amount of new material, which may include new raw data (e.g., experiments or datasets), new analyses of existing data, or substantially new discussions and conclusions that provide clear added value beyond the original conference version.

• Seek permission for reuse of the published conference paper if the author does not hold the copyright (proof of permission should be submitted as supplementary material or sent to the Editorial Office).
• Cite the conference in the references section if applicable.

5. Subscriber Services

For articles published in 2022 and earlier, subscription information is available at: https://www.discoverymedicine.com/subscriptions/.

Updated on 9 June 2026