Licensing Policy

The Pakistan Journal of Clinical Research (PJCR) enforces an uncompromising open-access licensing framework designed to facilitate global knowledge sharing, maximize the ethical reuse of clinical research, and maintain absolute structural transparency. In strict compliance with international open-access publishing benchmarks, all articles, editorials, commentaries, and compiled scholarly outputs published by the journal are issued exclusively under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The journal does not permit alternative licenses or restrictive deviations, ensuring a uniform, machine-readable legal environment across the entirety of its digital publication stream.

Under the CC BY 4.0 legal framework, authors retain full, unrestricted copyright and unconditional publishing rights over their work without administrative limitations. This license explicitly grants permission to readers, institutional repositories, and global third parties to freely copy, download, distribute, display, crawl, data-mine, print, search, or link to the full-text versions of the articles. Furthermore, users are legally permitted to adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the published text for any purpose, including commercial applications, provided that the original authors receive clear attribution and the journal metadata is accurately cited as the original place of publication.

To support comprehensive digital preservation and open science practices, the journal operates an unembargoed self-archiving pipeline that permits authors to deposit all versions of their work in institutional or disciplinary repositories. Authors retain the absolute right to share their un-peer-reviewed Preprint, their post-peer-review Author Accepted Manuscript, and the final publisher-formatted Version of Record PDF at any stage of the research lifecycle without encountering publication fees or time delays. Authors remain solely responsible for ensuring that all third-party copyrighted elements, such as specific medical illustrations or complex data charts, have received formal written reuse clearance and display appropriate legal attribution before final submission. The journal reserves the operational right to distribute metadata via global indexing platforms and enforce strict publication ethics, including the deployment of errata or formal Retraction Notices in absolute alignment with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.