Smart: Journal of Islamic Religion and Sharia Studies (SSharia) is strongly committed to the global dissemination of academic research and the principles of open access. To ensure that the scholarly work we publish is widely accessible while protecting the rights of our contributors, the journal operates under the following copyright and licensing framework.

I. Copyright Ownership

• Author Retention: Authors who publish with SSharia retain the full copyright and the full publishing rights to their work without restrictions.

• Right of First Publication: By submitting a manuscript to the journal, authors grant SSharia the right of first publication of their article.

II. Licensing Terms (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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

Under this license, readers, researchers, and the general public are free to:

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

• Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

However, these freedoms are granted under the following strict conditions:

• Attribution (BY): Users must give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the journal (Smart: Journal of Islamic Religion and Sharia Studies), provide a link to the formal publication (typically via the DOI), provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if any changes were made to the original work. This attribution must be done in a reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the author or the journal endorses the user or their specific use of the work.

• ShareAlike (SA): If a user remixes, transforms, or builds upon the original article, they must distribute their new, derivative contributions under the exact same license (CC BY-SA 4.0) as the original work.

III. Open Access Declaration

In alignment with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), all content published in SSharia is freely available without charge to the user or their institution immediately upon publication. Users are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, provided they adhere to the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

IV. Author Warranties

By submitting an article for publication, the author warrants that:

1. The submission is original, has not been formally published in any other peer-reviewed journal, and is not currently under consideration by any other publisher.

2. The manuscript contains no defamatory or otherwise unlawful statements and does not infringe upon the rights (including privacy and intellectual property rights) of others.

3. They have obtained written permission from copyright owners for any excerpts from copyrighted works that are included and have credited the sources in the article appropriately.