Terms of Service

These Terms are published at stacksjournal.org/terms-of-service and replace any earlier Terms of Service or Terms of Use published at stacksjournal.org. Versions from 1.0 onward stay available at permanent addresses linked from this page, which also shows the current version and the date it was last updated.

Who we are

Stacks Journal is published by Stacks Journal, Inc., a corporation incorporated in Oregon, USA, whose registered office is 5441 S Macadam Ave, Ste R, Portland, OR 97239, USA. Post to us at 16409 SE Division St, Ste 216 PMB 1098, Portland, OR 97236, USA. Who runs the journal, and our full publisher details, are under Publisher & Contact and Editorial Governance.

Below, "we" means Stacks Journal, Inc. and "you" means the person using the Services.

What these terms cover

These Terms are the agreement between you and us for the journal website at stacksjournal.org (including www.stacksjournal.org), the peer-review platform at review.stacksjournal.org, and any other site or service where we link to these Terms ("the Services").

"Your Content" is anything you submit or upload, including feedback you send an author through the link on an article page, which we pass to the corresponding author (Post-Publication Review & Discussion).

"The Published Record" means a published article and everything we publish with it: the reviewers' names and their reports, their recommended outcomes and the count of reviewers who recommended acceptance, each round's version of the manuscript and the changes between rounds, your written responses to the reviewers, and the article metadata.

The other documents in this agreement

Two other documents form part of this agreement. The Editorial Policies govern peer review, authorship, research ethics, misconduct, corrections and retractions, open access and licensing, fees and generative AI. The Privacy Policy governs personal data. The Editorial Policies in turn incorporate our Instructions to Authors, which set out manuscript requirements and formatting and which we may change at any time (Article Submissions).

We do not restate those documents here; we link to them. Where they disagree with these Terms, the Editorial Policies win on editorial questions and the Privacy Policy wins on personal data — except that the grant in The license you give us, the payment mechanics in Fees, payment and refunds and the undertakings in Taking part in peer review are governed by these Terms. On everything else, these Terms win.

The version of the Editorial Policies in force when you act applies to what you do then: the policies that applied when you submitted a manuscript govern that submission through to its decision, and the formatting requirements in force when you submit apply to that submission. A change to a fee applies only to a charge made after we have told you about it.

Accepting these terms

You accept these Terms when you create an account, submit a manuscript, accept an invitation to review, or pay a fee. If you do any of those for an institution or laboratory, you confirm you may accept them on its behalf.

Some parts of these Terms apply to everyone who uses the Services, with or without an account, because they are the rules for using the sites themselves: Acceptable use, Our intellectual property, Disclaimers and Limitation of liability. By using either site you agree to those sections.

What you may do with an article or a review once it is published is governed by its CC BY 4.0 license, not by this agreement. You do not need an account to read anything we publish, but using either site means you agree to the sections listed above.

Who can use Stacks Journal

You must be at least 18 and able to enter into a contract. The Services are not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, and we delete it if we discover it.

Use the name you publish under — a preferred name is fine (Authorship & Contributorship) — and your real affiliation, because the peer-review record depends on both. Do not misrepresent who you are, impersonate anyone, or submit someone else's work as your own.

We take payments through Stripe, and US sanctions rules mean we cannot accept submissions or payments from some countries, or from people and institutions on US sanctions lists. If you are not sure whether this affects you, ask us before you pay and we will check.

Anyone can create an account. Having one does not make you a reviewer or an editor, does not mean you have been invited to review, and gives you no access to a manuscript you are not assigned to.

Your account

Keep your details accurate, especially your email address: that is how we send review invitations, deadlines and decisions. Most accounts sign in through a link or a six-digit code sent by email, so your email account is effectively the key to your Stacks Journal account. Never forward a sign-in link or code, and do not share your account. We may revoke or replace a link we have emailed you, and if you think a link from us has reached someone who should not have it, tell us immediately.

The security of your Stacks Journal account is the security of your email account, so protect that: turn on two-factor authentication with your email provider, and tell us as soon as you think someone else has access to either.

One person, one account. Do not open a second account to get around a suspension or to review your own work.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• misrepresent your identity, institution, qualifications or publication record, impersonate another person, or submit someone else's work as your own;

• submit work you have no right to submit, including work that infringes copyright or breaches a confidentiality obligation;

• try to identify or reveal a reviewer or an author during review, or approach them outside the platform;

• share unpublished manuscript or review material that you received as a reviewer or an editor with anyone outside the review — see Confidentiality of Manuscripts Under Review, which also sets out the one exception, a consultation with a colleague that we have approved in advance;

• harass, threaten or abuse anyone;

• scrape, crawl or bulk-download the peer-review platform, or any page that is not publicly published, or run automated tools that load our sites unreasonably;

• get around access controls, rate limits or the blinding that keeps review anonymous;

• test our systems for vulnerabilities without asking us first;

• upload malware, interfere with the platform's operation, or use it to send spam.

If you think you have found a security problem, email contact@stacksjournal.org. We welcome the report, and we will not pursue anyone who tells us in good faith, keeps it confidential and gives us a reasonable time to fix it.

You also agree not to do anything our policies treat as misconduct — fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, image manipulation, or manipulation of citations, metrics or peer review. Those are defined, and allegations handled, under Handling Allegations of Misconduct, Plagiarism & Text Recycling, Citation Practices and Paper Mills.

Submitting a manuscript

When you submit a manuscript, you promise us that:

• you have the right to submit it and it infringes nobody's rights;

• everyone listed meets our authorship criteria, nobody who should be listed is missing, and all of them have agreed to this submission and to our Editorial Policies. Only the submitting author needs an account;

• the research meets our research ethics requirements, including approvals and consents, and the rules on identifiable data;

• the manuscript meets our requirements on eligibility and prior posting, data, materials and code, competing interests and funding and AI disclosure.

Two of those obligations outlive publication: you agree to keep your original data and materials for six years after publication and to provide them on request, and to cooperate if we investigate the integrity of a published article (Research Ethics, Handling Allegations of Misconduct).

Write your responses to reviewers on the basis that we will publish them if your article is published.

Submitting a manuscript does not guarantee that we will review it, accept it or publish it. We may decline it at desk check, decline to send it for review, or decline to publish it, even after acceptance if something comes to light. The Editorial Team makes the decision, using the thresholds in Final Decision. You can appeal through Appeals & Complaints; after an appeal, the decision is final.

A manuscript we decline — at desk check or after review — cannot be resubmitted to Stacks Journal (Desk Check, Final Decision). If you miss a revision deadline without an extension, we may remove the manuscript from consideration (Author Responses & Revisions). Your fee is not refunded in either case.

The timings we publish under Expected Manuscript Turnaround Times — both the target timeline and the measured medians — are estimates, not contractual deadlines, and we may change the timeline for a submission where rigorous review requires it. Paying a fee, paying a discounted fee, or holding a membership makes no difference to any editorial decision (Editorial Independence & Non-Discrimination).

The license you give us

You keep the copyright in your Content; we do not ask you to transfer it. What you give us is permission to do what a journal has to do, in two parts.

While your work is unpublished

You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store your manuscript and to:

• show it to the editors handling it and to the reviewers we invite, including sending the title and abstract to a prospective reviewer when we approach them;

• send it to our similarity-screening provider, which compares it against that provider's corpus of published and previously submitted work, without adding your manuscript to that corpus;

• send its text to the contracted AI provider that structures manuscripts for typesetting and derives the subject classifications used for reviewer matching, as described under Stacks Journal's use of AI; and

• typeset it and prepare it for publication.

We do not publish unpublished material, and we do not license it to anyone beyond the providers that carry out those steps and only for those purposes. We do not send manuscript text, reviewer comments or author responses to any provider for that provider to train its models on, and we do not use unpublished manuscripts or unpublished review material to train AI models.

We do keep the full editorial record: each round's version of a manuscript, the reviewer comments on it, and the record of which suggested edits were accepted. We keep it because the review record, appeals and post-publication integrity work depend on it, and we keep it for submissions that are rejected or withdrawn as well as for those we publish. What we may do with the structured data derived from that record is set out under Stacks Journal's use of AI. The Privacy Policy explains how long we keep it and what rights you have over it.

If your work is published

You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable license in your Content as published — the article, its figures, tables, data and supplementary material, your responses to reviewers — to publish, reproduce, distribute, display, adapt, translate, reformat, deposit, archive and promote it as part of the Published Record, and to sublicense those rights. You also grant the public a license in it under CC BY 4.0, which we apply on your behalf when we publish; that public license is irrevocable by its own terms.

Your published article and the reviews published with it are licensed CC BY 4.0 on the terms in Open Access & Copyright, which covers the article, the published reviews, datasets, supplementary information and the other content we publish with it. We will use a different license — another Creative Commons license or CC0 — only where you ask us to and we agree it in writing before publication. Once published, the article and its reviews are CC BY 4.0.

You may still deposit your own versions in a repository (Repository Policy). We may feature the Published Record on our own social media accounts, and will take it down from our channels if you ask.

If your manuscript is rejected or withdrawn, the publication license never takes effect. We keep the submission and its review material, as described above and in the Privacy Policy.

The published record is permanent

Once an article is published it is part of the scholarly record, and you cannot ask us to delete it. We correct, flag or withdraw published work only through the editorial process — Post-Publication Policies, Corrections, Expressions of Concern & Retractions, Article Versioning — and any notice we publish is itself permanent.

Three things that rule does not stop. We change an author's or a reviewer's name on an article, in its metadata and in its Crossref deposit on request, without a public correction notice, so that a name change does not expose a former name. We remove personal data published in error — a participant's identifier, a stray email address — without a public notice. And we may withdraw a published review where we judge that publication has become unsafe or unlawful, or where a reviewer's consent is shown to have been invalid; the article, and the number of reviewers who recommended acceptance, stay as published.

Published articles will be assigned a DOI and registered with Crossref on publication, are indexed by third parties, and are deposited for long-term preservation where we have an archiving arrangement in place (Indexing & Long-Term Digital Preservation). Copies held by indexers, archives and readers are outside our control.

Taking part in peer review

If you accept an invitation to review, you agree that:

• you will treat the manuscript and the review as confidential, and will not share them outside the review except through a consultation we have approved in advance;

• you will not upload the manuscript or your review to any generative AI tool or AI-assisted writing platform — public, consumer or enterprise — which we treat as a breach of confidentiality;

• you will disclose conflicts of interest and decline if you have one you cannot manage;

• the review is your own work and your own judgement; and

• if the article is published, we publish your name, your Final Thoughts Form, your recommended outcome, and your comments and suggested edits in the collaborative document, and we may publish your institution and links to your public researcher profiles (e.g. ORCID, ResearchGate, Google Scholar), alongside the article under CC BY 4.0. Everything except notes you keep private is published — a note you later share to the discussion becomes part of the review and is published with it — and the article shows how many reviewers recommended acceptance, so your name appears next to your recommendation. If the article is rejected, withdrawn, or accepted but never published, none of it is published and your identity stays confidential.

Accepting the invitation is your agreement to that publication, and you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable license to publish, reproduce, distribute, display, adapt, reformat, deposit, archive and promote your review as part of the Published Record, and to sublicense those rights; you also grant the public a license in it under CC BY 4.0. Reviewer Consent to Publication has the detail, including the case where a reviewer who did not complete the later rounds is published under their reviewer label rather than their name (Peer Review).

Once you have submitted your review you cannot withdraw this agreement as a right, because the published record is permanent. If something serious changes — a risk to your safety, for example — write to us. In exceptional cases we can withdraw the published review: we remove the review file from the journal site and take the review page offline. The article and its metadata stay. If we hold no record of your agreement, we publish your review under your "Reviewer N" label rather than your name. The data-protection basis on which we publish a reviewer's identity, and what that means for your rights, are set out in the Privacy Policy.

Two further things we do, which you should know before you accept. We build an expertise and verification profile for you from your public publication record, with the help of an AI tool we run under contract, so that we can match you to manuscripts in your field and confirm your identity and expertise (Stacks Journal's use of AI). An editor reviews it before acting on it, no decision about you is made by automated means alone, and you can ask us what it says and ask us to correct it; the Privacy Policy sets out what we send and to whom. And we may show statistics derived from your reviewing — such as review counts and turnaround — on your profile and on articles you reviewed, and you can opt in to be credited as a "Collaborator" on the published article (Publication).

Reviewing is voluntary and unpaid. We may remove you from a review, or from the reviewer pool, if you breach these Terms or our policies.

Fees, payment and refunds

Our fees are listed in US dollars under Submission Fees, Memberships, & Special Issues: single submissions, annual and institutional memberships, and Special Issues. What they pay for is under Revenue Sources. We may offer discounts and special offers from time to time; a discount has no bearing on how your manuscript is reviewed.

A single submission fee is due when you submit. Memberships and Special Issue fees are charged in advance, and a membership must be valid at the time you submit. Payments are taken by Stripe on pages Stripe hosts, so we never see or store your card details, and Stripe's own terms apply to the payment. You are responsible for taxes and bank charges, except any tax we are required to collect at checkout.

Refunds

Submission fees and memberships are non-refundable on the terms in Submission Fees, Memberships, & Special Issues, including where an article is withdrawn or rejected.

Exceptions:

• If you are charged twice for the same thing, tell us and we will refund the duplicate payment through Stripe, or credit your account instead if you would rather.

• If we make a billing mistake, we will put it right the same way.

Credits and membership entitlements

A single-author membership entitles the first author named on it to submit during the membership year, and a lab or team membership entitles up to ten first authors named on it to do the same; an entitlement that is not used by the end of that year does not carry over. A single-article credit you have paid for and not yet used does not expire, and you may use it at any time while your account is open. Except under the EU and UK withdrawal right described below, we do not refund an unused entitlement or credit when a membership is cancelled or lapses, when we suspend an account, or when you close your account.

Memberships that renew

An annual membership renews automatically unless you cancel first. You can cancel at any time by writing to contact@stacksjournal.org. The renewal reminder we email before each charge also carries a billing portal link you can cancel through. Cancelling stops the next charge and does not refund the current year.

Before each renewal we email a reminder to your account address with the renewal date and the renewal price. A price increase applies only to a term that starts after we have told you about it. If a renewal is charged and you did not want it, tell us within 30 days and we will cancel the membership so that it does not renew again but will not initiate a refund.

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, you have 14 days from taking out a membership to withdraw from it, and we refund what you paid less a proportionate deduction for the period already supplied. Write to contact@stacksjournal.org to do that.

If a payment is reversed or charged back, we may suspend the membership or submission it covered.

Suspension and termination

You can stop using the Services at any time. Write to us and we will close your account: we disable your sign-in, stop sending you invitations and reminders, and remove you from the reviewer pool.

Closing an account is not erasure. We do not delete your manuscripts, reviews, comments or anything in the Published Record, because the editorial record and our obligations to authors, reviewers and readers depend on them. Closing an account does not withdraw a manuscript, end a review you committed to, or refund fees. If you want data outside the Published Record erased or exported, write to contact@stacksjournal.org; the Privacy Policy explains what we keep, what we can erase and how we handle those requests.

We may restrict, suspend or close your account, remove Content, decline future submissions, or remove you from the reviewer pool if you breach these Terms or the Editorial Policies, if we have good reason to think you have, or if the law requires it. Unless we must act at once, we will tell you in writing what the problem is, give you 14 days to respond, and tell you how to challenge the outcome. We aim to decide a challenge within 30 days and will tell you if it will take longer. This does not apply to the routine moderation of reviewer comments during review, which we may remove at the time under Peer Review; we tell the reviewer when we have done so.

Editorial decisions and misconduct findings go through Appeals & Complaints. A complaint about an account sanction goes to contact@stacksjournal.org and is decided by the Editor-in-Chief, who holds final authority over editorial matters (Editor-in-Chief).

These parts still apply after your account is closed: licenses granted for published work, the permanence of the Published Record, fees owed, your duty to retain original data and materials and to cooperate with a post-publication integrity investigation, the disclaimers, the liability limit, the indemnity and the governing-law section.

Our intellectual property

We own the platform and the journal site: the software, the design, the review tools, the typeset layouts and the arrangement of what we publish. Our names — "Stacks Journal" and "Stacks" — and our logos belong to us, and these Terms give you no right to use them beyond the attribution a CC BY 4.0 article requires. Some parts of the platform are third-party software under their own licenses.

Third-party services and links

The Services link out to repositories, funders, institutions, identifier services and other publishers. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or their terms.

We rely on third-party providers to run the journal, including hosting and database providers, an email provider, payment processing, an AI provider, similarity screening, bibliographic data services, DOI registration, our publishing platform, and the analytics and advertising services described in the Privacy Policy. The Privacy Policy sets out what each kind of provider receives; what the AI tools do is under Stacks Journal's use of AI. Payment is handled by Stripe under Stripe's own terms and privacy policy, and Stripe also acts on its own account, not ours, for fraud prevention and legal compliance.

Copyright infringement notices

If you believe something on our sites infringes your copyright, send a notice to us at contact@stacksjournal.org.

Include your signature, electronic or physical; the work you say was infringed; the URL of the material you want removed; your contact details; a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them.

On a complete notice we will expeditiously remove or disable access to the material identified, and tell whoever posted it. They may send a counter-notice with the equivalent information, including a statement under penalty of perjury. If they do, we will restore the material between 10 and 14 business days after we receive the counter-notice, unless you tell us first that you have filed a court action to stop the infringement. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

Published articles need both things to happen at once. On a complete notice we disable access to the challenged material — a figure, a table, a supplementary file, or the article itself if necessary — while the DOI, the article metadata and a published notice of what we have done remain. We then decide the research-integrity outcome, by correction or retraction, under Post-Publication Policies, so that the scholarly record keeps a record of the article rather than losing it.

Email and legal notices

We send transactional email about your submissions, reviews, membership and payments. You cannot opt out of it while you have work with us, because it is how the journal reaches you. We may also invite you to submit or to review, and announce Special Issues; you can opt out of those at any time by writing to contact@stacksjournal.org (Direct Marketing). If you ask us not to contact you again, we will stop.

We may send you legal notices — about these Terms, your membership, or a security incident affecting your data — by email to your account address, so keep it current. By accepting these Terms you agree to receive those notices electronically. If personal data is breached, we notify the people affected and the authorities as the law requires.

Disclaimers

We provide the Services as they are. We do not promise they will always be available or free of faults: we take the platform offline for deployments and maintenance, unplanned outages happen, and we may add, change or withdraw features. We do not warrant that the platform is error-free, or that peer review catches every problem in a manuscript.

Published articles report their authors' research and views. We do not warrant that any article, review or reader feedback is accurate, complete or fit for a particular purpose, and nothing we publish is professional advice: do not rely on an article for medical, clinical, legal or financial decisions.

The descriptive statements in the Editorial Policies — including indexing, preservation and turnaround figures — describe our arrangements as they stand at the time and are not warranties.

If you live somewhere that does not allow these exclusions — many countries in the EU, and the UK, do not — they do not apply to you to that extent. Nothing here removes a consumer right that cannot be waived.

Limitation of liability

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, data or reputation arising from your use of the Services. Our total liability to you is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or US$100.

These limits do not apply to liability that the law does not allow us to limit, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, and for fraud, gross negligence or wilful misconduct. Nothing here removes a consumer right that cannot be waived.

Indemnity

If someone else brings a claim against us because of your Content or your breach of these Terms — copyright, defamation, the privacy of research participants, a misconduct dispute — you will cover our reasonable losses, costs and legal fees, and help us deal with it.

This applies only to the extent the claim was not caused by something we did, and in particular it does not cover a claim arising from our own decision to publish, edit or typeset material. It does not apply to a reviewer acting in good faith within these Terms and our policies: a reviewer's indemnity is limited to claims arising from their own breach of the confidentiality and conflict undertakings above, or from bad-faith conduct. It does not apply at all if you are a consumer and the law where you live does not allow it, and nothing here removes a consumer right that cannot be waived.

We will tell you promptly about any such claim, will not settle it in a way that binds you without your prior written consent, and you may instruct your own lawyer at your own cost.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the State of Oregon, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Before starting formal proceedings, you agree to send us a written description of the dispute at contact@stacksjournal.org and to allow sixty days from that notice for us to resolve it. That period does not count against the time limit below. Complaints about editorial decisions are handled under Appeals & Complaints.

Binding individual arbitration. If the dispute is not resolved within those sixty days, you and we agree to resolve it by binding arbitration, on an individual basis, rather than in court. The arbitration is administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules — or its Commercial Arbitration Rules if you used the Services for an institution or business — before a single arbitrator. It is conducted by video or in writing unless the arbitrator decides a hearing in person is needed, in which case it is held in Portland, Oregon, or in the county where you live. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this agreement to arbitrate. The arbitrator decides whether a dispute must be arbitrated, and can award the same individual relief a court could.

Fees. We pay the AAA's filing, administration and arbitrator fees beyond what you would have paid to file the claim in court, unless the arbitrator finds the claim was frivolous or brought for an improper purpose.

Exceptions. Either of us may instead bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies there. Either of us may go to court to stop the infringement or misuse of intellectual property or a breach of confidentiality. Nothing here stops you from bringing a concern to a government agency.

No class actions. Claims may be brought only individually, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective or representative proceeding, and an arbitrator may not combine the claims of more than one person. If this paragraph is found unenforceable for a claim, that claim proceeds in the state or federal courts in Multnomah County, Oregon, and not in arbitration.

Mass filings. If 25 or more similar claims are brought against us by, or with the help of, the same lawyers or organization, they are administered under the AAA's Mass Arbitration Supplementary Rules, and the fees and timing follow those rules.

Opting out. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing contact@stacksjournal.org within 30 days of the date these Terms took effect, or within 30 days of creating your account if that is later, giving your name, the email address on your account and a statement that you opt out of arbitration. If you opt out, disputes are decided by the state and federal courts in Multnomah County, Oregon, and both of us consent to that venue.

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, the arbitration agreement above does not apply to you, and none of this removes your right to bring proceedings where you live, or the protection of your own country's mandatory consumer law. A claim under these Terms must be brought within one year of when you first knew, or should have known, about it, unless the law that applies to you says otherwise.

California residents

Under California Civil Code section 1789.3: this service is provided by Stacks Journal, Inc., 16409 SE Division St, Ste 216 PMB 1098, Portland, OR 97236, USA. The charges for the service are the fees stated under Submission Fees, Memberships, & Special Issues. You may contact us at contact@stacksjournal.org. You may also file a complaint with the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, telephone 1-800-952-5210.

Changes to these terms

We may change these Terms. The version and effective date at the top tell you which one you are reading, and earlier versions stay available at permanent addresses linked from this page. If a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will email registered users and post a notice on the platform at least 30 days before it takes effect. Using the Services after that date means you accept the new version; if you do not, ask us to close your account.

General terms

These Terms, with the Editorial Policies and the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement about the Services. If a court finds part of them unenforceable, the rest stands, and if we do not enforce something straight away we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours if the journal is sold or reorganized. Neither of us is liable for delays caused by events outside our reasonable control. Nothing here makes either of us the other's agent, partner or employee. If we publish a translation of these Terms, the English version is the one that applies.

Contact

Questions about these Terms, appeals, complaints, account problems, data-protection requests and takedown notices all go to contact@stacksjournal.org, or by post to Stacks Journal, Inc., 16409 SE Division St, Ste 216 PMB 1098, Portland, OR 97236, USA.