To advance scholarly communication, support open science, and ensure the long-term preservation of pharmaceutical research, International Pharmacy Acta (IPA) maintains a clear self-archiving and repository policy. This policy delineates the rights and obligations of authors regarding the deposit and public dissemination of different versions of their manuscripts in external non-commercial repositories, preprint servers, and academic networks.
Manuscript Versions Defined
In alignment with international publishing conventions (NISO specifications), manuscript versions are defined as follows:
Preprint (Author’s Original Manuscript - AOM): The initial, unreviewed version of a manuscript before formal peer review and editorial assessment.
Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM): The peer-reviewed, revised version accepted for publication by the Editor-in-Chief, incorporating all academic revisions but excluding final publisher typesetting, copyediting, formatting, and pagination.
Version of Record (VoR): The final published article, comprehensively copyedited, typeset, assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and officially published on the International Pharmacy Acta website.
Preprint Policy
International Pharmacy Acta does not host, operate, or maintain an in-house preprint server. However, the journal recognizes the value of early scientific dissemination:
Pre-submission Posting: Authors may post their unreviewed Preprint (AOM) on recognized, independent non-commercial preprint servers (such as bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, or arXiv) or institutional preprint archives before or concurrently with submission to IPA. Such deposits do not constitute prior publication and will not compromise the consideration of the manuscript.
Disclosure Obligation: Authors must disclose the existence of any preprint version in the cover letter during submission, including the repository name, DOI, and active access URL.
Post-Acceptance Linking: Upon formal publication of the Version of Record in IPA, the author is responsible for updating the metadata on the preprint server with a direct bibliographic citation and an active cross-link using the official DOI to the final article on the IPA website (e.g., “This article has been peer-reviewed and published in International Pharmacy Acta: https://doi.org/[DOI]”).
Institutional, Subject, and Personal Repositories Policy
As a Diamond Open Access publication, International Pharmacy Acta permits immediate, zero-embargo self-archiving under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0):
Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM):
Timing: Authors may deposit their AAM in institutional repositories, departmental websites, or subject repositories immediately upon formal editorial acceptance (Zero Embargo).
Conditions: The deposit must state that the article has been accepted for publication in International Pharmacy Acta and include the journal name.
Version of Record (VoR):
Timing: Authors may deposit the final published PDF (VoR) in non-commercial institutional, national, or disciplinary repositories, as well as personal academic profiles (e.g., ResearchGate, Academia.edu, institutional faculty pages) immediately upon publication on the IPA platform (Zero Embargo).
Conditions: The deposited file must retain all original publisher identifiers, copyright statements, and the CC BY-NC 4.0 notice. Full bibliographic attribution to the original publication venue in International Pharmacy Acta, accompanied by the article’s persistent DOI link, must be clearly displayed.
Commercial Use: Depositing either the AAM or VoR into commercial document repositories or reselling/relicensing the content without explicit written permission from the publisher and copyright holders is strictly prohibited.
