Open Access Policies

Open Access (OA) refers to the unrestricted online availability of scholarly research publications—and the unrestricted use of these publications—in today’s digital and big-data era. The term and the concept were first defined in three landmark statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities(2003). Under the Open Access model, MAS advances science and education and benefits researchers and students because:

• Publications are immediately available online without subscription or price barriers.  

• They can be freely archived in any personal, institutional, or governmental repository.  

• They can be freely redistributed or reused without seeking permission.  

• They achieve higher visibility among a global audience.  

• Greater exposure leads to more citations.

Copyright & Licensing

Unless otherwise stated, every MAS journal article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Copyright in the article remains with the author(s). Under this licence, the author(s) grant anyone the legal right to reuse the article—including data, figures, and supplementary material—for virtually any purpose, without permission or payment, provided the original authors and source are properly cited.

Please note that certain articles (especially reviews) may contain figures, tables, or text taken from other publications. MAS does not hold the copyright to such third-party material and therefore cannot grant permission to reuse it. You must consult the original copyright holder—usually the original publisher or author—to determine whether the material may be reused.

All papers published in MAS journals carry the following notice:

© © 2025 by the authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided t