I. Retention of Copyright and Authorial Primacy

Smart: Journal of Criminal Law Review and Analysis (SCrim) operates under a progressive intellectual property regime that expressly guarantees authorial primacy. Authors who publish doctrinal analyses, empirical studies, and legal scholarship within SCrim retain the full, unrestricted copyright and all proprietary rights associated with their respective works, without subsequent transfer or assignment to the publisher. By submitting a manuscript for consideration, authors grant SCrim the non-exclusive, irrevocable right of first publication, thereby ensuring that the journal is permanently acknowledged as the original venue of scholarly dissemination. This framework is designed to empower legal scholars to maximize the impact of their research while maintaining sovereign control over their intellectual output.

II. The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)

To facilitate the broadest possible engagement with contemporary criminal jurisprudence and penal reform, all articles published in SCrim are strictly governed by, and distributed under, the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). By authorizing publication in SCrim, authors affirmatively consent to the application of this license to their final published article (the Version of Record). Under this specific statutory framework, third parties including legal practitioners, academics, and the general public are explicitly granted the right to:

• Copy and Redistribute: Reproduce and transmit the material in any medium or format, globally and in perpetuity.

• Adapt and Remix: Translate, transform, and build upon the underlying legal analysis and empirical data for any purpose, including commercial endeavors.

However, these ex ante permissions are inextricably bound to the following unyielding legal conditions:

• Attribution (BY): Any party utilizing the work must provide appropriate, conspicuous credit to the original author(s), cite SCrim as the locus of first publication, provide a direct hyperlink to the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and explicitly indicate if any substantive modifications were made to the original text. Such attribution must not be rendered in a manner that suggests the author or SCrim endorses the third party or their specific use of the material.

• ShareAlike (SA): If a third party remixes, transforms, or materially builds upon the original scholarship to create a derivative work (such as a translated iteration or an expanded comparative analysis), they are legally obligated to distribute their new contributions under the exact same CC BY-SA 4.0 license as the original manuscript. This ensures the perpetual openness of the derivative scholarship.

III. Archival, Institutional Repositories, and Pre-Print Policies

In strict alignment with the global Open Access movement and the democratization of legal knowledge, SCrim explicitly permits and actively encourages authors to engage in self-archiving practices. Authors maintain the right to deposit all versions of their manuscript including the submitted pre-print, the peer-reviewed post-print (accepted manuscript), and the final publisher's PDF (Version of Record) into institutional repositories (e.g., university archives), subject-based repositories (e.g., the Social Science Research Network [SSRN]), and personal academic websites. When archiving the final published version, authors are required to include a complete citation and a persistent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) linking back to the formal publication on the SCrim platform.

IV. Authorial Warranties and Third-Party Intellectual Property

By executing the publishing agreement and consenting to the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, authors legally warrant that their manuscript constitutes an original work of authorship and does not infringe upon the statutory copyrights, proprietary rights, or privacy rights of any third party. If the manuscript incorporates pre-existing, copyrighted materials (e.g., extensive empirical data sets, proprietary models, or extended translated statutes) that fall outside the bounds of fair use doctrine, the author bears the sole fiduciary responsibility for securing express, written permission from the respective copyright holders prior to publication. Authors must subsequently ensure that such third-party material is clearly demarcated and exempted from the overarching CC BY-SA 4.0 license applied to the remainder of the article.