These terms are an agreement between you and Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge Inc. (“ICCK”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in the United States with its registered office in Spokane, Washington.

They apply to www.icck.org and every service reached through it: reading published articles, holding an account, submitting a manuscript, reviewing or editing for a journal, and ICCK membership. By using any of these you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please stop using the sites.

Two further documents form part of this agreement and should be read with it: our Privacy Policy, which governs personal data, and each journal's published author guidelines, which govern the detail of submission and review for that journal. Where a journal's author guidelines say something more specific than these terms, the guidelines apply to that journal.

• You must give accurate information when you register, and keep it current. An account in a false name, or one that misrepresents your affiliation, may be closed.
• One account per person. Accounts are personal to you and may not be shared or transferred.
• You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for everything done through your account. Tell us at once if you believe it has been used without your permission.
• You may close your account at any time by writing to [email protected].

We may suspend or close an account where these terms have been broken, where an account is being used to submit fraudulent or plagiarised work, or where we are required to by law. Except where the breach is serious or we are legally prevented from doing so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond.

Closing your account does not withdraw a published article, and it does not end obligations already incurred — an unpaid invoice remains payable, and the record of a manuscript you submitted is retained under our Privacy Policy.

By submitting a manuscript to an ICCK journal, you confirm that:

• The work is yours. It is original, and where it draws on the work of others, that work is cited and — where the licence requires it — used with permission.
• You have the right to submit it. Nothing in your employment, funding or an earlier publishing agreement prevents it, and any institutional approval required has been obtained.
• All authors have agreed. Everyone named has seen the manuscript, agreed to its submission, and meets the journal's authorship criteria. Nobody who qualifies as an author has been left off, and nobody has been added who does not qualify.
• It is not under consideration elsewhere and has not been published before, except as a preprint or as disclosed to the editor in writing.
• Research involving people or animals was approved by the appropriate ethics committee, and informed consent was obtained where required. Identifying details of participants are included only with their consent.
• Competing interests and funding are declared in full.
• Any use of generative AI is disclosed as the journal's guidelines require. AI tools are not authors, and you remain responsible for everything in the manuscript.

The submitting author acts on behalf of all co-authors and is responsible for communicating with them. We correspond with the submitting and corresponding authors, and we are entitled to treat their instructions as given for all authors.

Submission does not guarantee review, and review does not guarantee publication. Editorial decisions rest with the journal's editors and are made on scholarly merit. Each journal's guidelines describe how to appeal a decision.

Authors keep copyright in their own work. Articles published open access are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0), which lets anyone copy, distribute, adapt and build on the article, including commercially, provided the original authors and source are credited, a link to the licence is given, and any changes are indicated. Crediting the work must not imply that the authors or ICCK endorse the use made of it.

By submitting to an open access journal you grant ICCK the right to publish the article under that licence and to deposit its metadata with Crossref, DOAJ, indexing services and preservation archives.

Not every ICCK journal is open access. Where an article is published under a subscription or hybrid model and the authors have not chosen the open access option, it is not covered by CC BY 4.0, and the rights granted to readers are those set out in the publishing agreement for that article and on the article page itself. If you are unsure which applies to a particular article, the licence statement on the article page governs.

• Authors re-using their own figures, tables or text in later work need no permission from us — cite the original article and you are done.
• Some figures and extracts within an article are reproduced from other copyrighted sources under a separate permission. Those are marked, and re-using them requires permission from the original rightsholder, not from ICCK.
• Requests to re-use subscription content should go to [email protected].

The website, its design, the ICCK name, logo and journal titles belong to ICCK or its licensors. Nothing in these terms gives you a right to use them. The site is provided for reading, submitting and reviewing — not for bulk extraction of the published corpus, which needs our written agreement.

• Charges are disclosed before you commit. Article processing charges (APC), optional publication charges (OPC) and membership dues are published on the relevant journal or membership page, and the amount for your article is stated on the invoice.
• Nothing is charged for submission or peer review. An APC becomes payable only after an article is accepted.
• The ability to pay plays no part in the editorial decision. Editors are not told whether a fee has been paid or waived.
• Invoices are payable within the period stated on them. Final files are not released for typesetting while an invoice is outstanding.
• Tax is added where it applies, and is shown separately on the invoice. The total on the invoice is the amount to transfer.
• Bank charges on a wire transfer are the payer's responsibility; please send the full invoice amount.
• Waivers and discounts are available in cases of genuine hardship and under our membership and voucher schemes. Ask the editorial office before publication, not after.

The published record is permanent. We do not quietly replace or delete published articles — every change is made in the open, so that anyone who has read or cited the article can see what happened.

• Corrections are published as a separate, citable notice linked to the article, and the article is updated where the error is in the article itself.
• Expressions of concern are published where a serious question has been raised that cannot yet be resolved.
• Retractions follow the COPE guidelines. A retracted article stays online, marked as retracted, with the retraction notice attached. It is not removed, because removing it would break the citations pointing at it.

We may make a correction or retraction without the authors' agreement where the evidence requires it, and we will say in the notice whether the authors agreed. Requests for a correction should go to the journal's editorial office.

When using the sites, you agree not to:

• attempt to gain access to any account, system or data that is not yours, or to probe, scan or test the security of the sites;
• interfere with the sites or the servers behind them, including by placing unreasonable load on them;
• scrape or systematically download the published corpus, or use automated means to collect personal data such as author e-mail addresses;
• impersonate anyone, or represent yourself as affiliated with ICCK when you are not;
• offer or accept payment for authorship, for a favourable review, or for a place on an editorial board;
• upload anything unlawful, or any file intended to damage a system that receives it;
• use material from the sites in a way the applicable licence does not permit.

Reviewers and editors additionally agree to treat every manuscript as confidential, not to use it for their own purposes before publication, and to declare any competing interest rather than handle a submission they should not.

The sites link to other websites — authors' institutions, funders, data repositories, indexing services and payment providers among them. Those sites are not ours. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their content or their practices, and a link is not an endorsement.

Anything you do with a third party reached through our sites is between you and them, on their terms. Payment providers in particular have their own terms and their own privacy policies, and your card details are handled by them rather than by us.

The views expressed in a published article are the authors', not ICCK's. Publication means the article passed peer review for that journal — it is not a warranty that the findings are correct.

We work to keep the sites available and the published record accurate, but the sites and their content are provided “as is”. We do not warrant that the sites will be uninterrupted or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that content is free of error. To the extent the law allows, we exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Nothing published by ICCK is professional advice. Research articles report findings; they are not medical, legal, engineering or financial advice, and they should not be relied on as a substitute for it.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, data or reputation, or for loss arising from your reliance on anything published on the sites. Where we are liable, our total liability to you for all claims connected with these terms is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or USD 100 if you paid us nothing.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, in which case the exclusion applies only as far as that jurisdiction permits.

You agree to indemnify us against claims brought by a third party that arise from your breach of these terms — in particular, from a claim that work you submitted infringes someone else's rights.

We may change these terms. The effective date at the top of the page always tells you which version you are reading. Where a change materially affects your rights we will tell account holders by e-mail before it takes effect. Continuing to use the sites after that date means you accept the new terms. The terms in force when you submitted a manuscript govern that submission, whatever we change afterwards.

We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the sites. We will give notice where we reasonably can. Published articles remain available and are deposited with preservation services, so that the record survives any change to this website.

If a court finds any provision invalid or unenforceable, that provision is limited or removed to the smallest extent necessary and the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion is not a waiver of it.

These terms, the Privacy Policy and the relevant journal guidelines are the whole agreement between us about the sites. You may not transfer your rights under them; we may transfer ours to a successor to our publishing business, on notice to you.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in Spokane County, Washington have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules of your own country's law.

Please write to us before starting proceedings. Most disputes are a misunderstanding that the editorial office can resolve in a few days.