Down Syndrome Research and Practice
Publication Policies

Copyright and licence policies

Open Access

All works published in Down Syndrome Research and Practice journals are Open Access. They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Licence. When complete, contributions are made available online and anyone may read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use the contribution for non-commercial purposes as long as the original authorship and source are appropriately attributed. This license encourages widespread dissemination, but does not permit derivative works.

Publishing licence

To permit publication and widespread dissemination of their contribution, authors (or the copyright owner, if not the authors) are requested to grant Down Syndrome Education Internationala perpetual licence to publish the submission under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Licence.

Prior to publication, you may share copies of your submission with colleagues and post on a web site or repository. Once your submission is accepted for publication, we request that you include a full bibliographic reference in all copies that you circulate. As soon as it is provided, this reference should include the DOI assigned to the contribution.

Authors' copyrights

Ownership of the copyrights in the submission remain with the authors (or original copyright owner, if not the authors).

Publication charges

Publication charges are not requested for News, Research Highlights, Updates, Practice Reports, Resources Reviews, Correspondence, Guidelines, Essays, or Reprints.

Where researchers do have funds available to support publication, we do request the payment of publication fees to partly cover the costs of editorial and peer review and preparation of submitted Reports, Reviews, Case Studies, Hypotheses, Perspectives and Opinions. The publication fee is £500.00 (€750.00 / US$1000.00). Where authors do not have the funds available (either from project grants or their institution) to cover publication fees, we are able to waive the fee. We keep fee payment status information hidden from editors and reviewers so that ability to pay cannot influence publication decisions.

Researchers may like to review the following resources about funding open access publishing:

Data sharing

Publication is conditional upon the agreement of authors to make freely available any materials and information associated with their contribution that in response to the reasonable requests of others for the purpose of academic, non-commercial research. In particular:

  1. Data for which public repositories have been established that are in general use should be deposited before publication, and the appropriate accession numbers or digital object identifiers published with the paper.
  2. If an appropriate repository does not exist, data should be provided as supporting information with the published paper. If this is not practical, data should be made freely available upon reasonable request.
  3. The conclusions of a study must not be dependent solely on the analysis of proprietary data. If proprietary data were used to reach a conclusion, and the authors are unwilling or unable to make these data public, then the paper must include an analysis of public data that validates the conclusions so that others can reproduce the analysis and build on the findings.

Down Syndrome Education Internationalis planning a data repository (Down Syndrome DataBank) for scientific data pertaining to Down syndrome. This is intended to supplement other public repositories. Please contact us or see our web site for further details.

Down Syndrome Abstracts

Down Syndrome Abstracts is a new service being developed by Down Syndrome Education International. It will be freely accessible online and will carry abstracts and references for material relevant to Down syndrome, which will include (but exceed) those also carried in PsycINFO, PubMed or ERIC. Since PsycINFO carries much that is not included in PubMed, but is not freely accessible, we hope this service will be of assistance to the research community, as well as the wider constituencies that we serve. We will be inviting the research community to assist us in maintaining this service. All Down Syndrome Research and Practice content will be indexed in this service.

Down Syndrome Archive

A further service being developed by Down Syndrome Education Internationalis an online archive to gather, index and preserve material relevant to Down syndrome to provide a convenient point of access for researchers, professionals and families. All Down Syndrome Research and Practice content will be deposited in this archive.

In addition, we will be encouraging the scientific community (copyright assignments permitting) to volunteer suitable papers, presentations, books and chapters for inclusion, indexing and preservation in the Down Syndrome Archive. Authors may (indeed, should) freely deposit in multiple repositories, as appropriate for the field of study.