Smart: Journal of Social Media Marketing and E-commerce (SMarket) is fully committed to the global dissemination of scholarly research and supports the open-access model of academic publishing. To maximize the reach, impact, and utility of the economic and marketing insights published within our journal, SMarket operates under strict yet accommodating intellectual property guidelines.

1. Copyright Ownership

SMarket respects the intellectual property of its contributors. Authors retain the full copyright and publishing rights to their work without restrictions.

By submitting a manuscript to SMarket, authors grant the journal the Right of First Publication. This allows the journal to be recognized as the original medium through which the research was disseminated to the academic and business communities.

2. Licensing Policy: CC BY-SA 4.0

All articles published in SMarket are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Under the terms of this license, readers, researchers, and institutions are free to:

• Share: Copy and redistribute the published material in any medium or format.

• Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the empirical data, theoretical frameworks, or textual material for any purpose, including commercial endeavors (such as industry reports or corporate marketing strategies).

Conditions of the License

To maintain academic integrity and respect for the original authors, these freedoms are granted under the following strict conditions:

• Attribution (BY): Users must give appropriate credit to the original authors, provide a link to the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and explicitly indicate if any modifications were made to the original work. This attribution must be done in a reasonable academic manner but not in any way that suggests the authors or SMarket endorses the user or their specific use of the material.

• ShareAlike (SA): If users remix, transform, or build upon the published research, they must distribute their new contributions under the exact same CC BY-SA 4.0 license as the original SMarket publication.

3. Self-Archiving Policy

Because authors retain their copyright, they are permitted and highly encouraged to self-archive their published articles (the final publisher's PDF version) on personal websites, institutional repositories, or academic networking platforms (e.g., ResearchGate, SSRN, Google Scholar). This practice enhances the visibility and citation potential of their research within the global digital economics and e-commerce ecosystems.