Open Access Policy
Open Access Policy
Global Journal of Education, Finance and Management (GJEFM) is a fully open access scholarly journal published by EP Journals Group. This document sets out the journal's open access policy in full, including the journal's commitment to immediate, unrestricted public access; the licensing terms applied to published content; the rights retained by authors; the journal's compliance with international funder mandates; the long-term preservation arrangements; and the operational mechanisms that uphold this policy in practice.
Identifiers: e-ISSN 3117-6771 (electronic), 3117-6763 (print).
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1. Statement of commitment to open access
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GJEFM is committed to the principle that publicly relevant scholarly research should be freely available to all readers, without paywalls, registration requirements, or any other access barriers. The journal operates under the gold open access publishing model: every published article is made freely available on the journal website and through CrossRef-resolved Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) immediately upon publication.
This commitment is non-negotiable and applies without exception to all peer-reviewed research articles, review articles, short communications, case studies, and editorial content published by the journal. GJEFM does not operate any paywall, embargo, subscription tier, hybrid track, or similar restriction.
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2. Definition of open access used by this journal
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GJEFM adopts the definition of open access set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) of 2002, which defines open access as the public availability of scholarly literature in such a way that any reader may freely:
— Read the full text of the article
— Download the full text and any associated files (datasets, supplementary materials, code where deposited)
— Copy and redistribute the article in any medium or format
— Print the article for personal, educational, or research use
— Search the article using any tool, including text and data mining systems
— Link to the full text from any other source
— Crawl the article for indexing, including by commercial and non-commercial search systems
— Pass the article as data to software, including machine-learning systems
— Use the article for any other lawful purpose
This freedom of access applies without registration, login, tracking, paywall, or any technical or contractual restriction.
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3. Article-level access provisions
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For every published article, GJEFM guarantees:
3.1 Immediate access. Articles are made freely available at the moment of publication. There is no embargo period of any duration.
3.2 No registration. Readers are not required to create an account, log in, accept marketing communications, or provide personal information of any kind to access full-text articles.
3.3 No paywall. GJEFM operates no paywall, metered access, soft paywall, or "premium" content tier. Every article is fully accessible to every reader.
3.4 Multiple access formats. Each published article is available as both a fully formatted PDF and as a web-readable HTML version, ensuring accessibility across devices, assistive technologies, and bandwidth conditions.
3.5 Unique persistent URL. Every article has its own unique URL on the journal website, making individual articles directly linkable and citable.
3.6 Persistent identifier. Every article is assigned a CrossRef Digital Object Identifier (DOI) at the time of publication, providing a permanent, citable link that remains stable even if the journal website undergoes future changes.
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4. Licensing framework — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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All articles published in GJEFM are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This is one of the most permissive of the standard Creative Commons licences and is the licence preferred by major research funders including Plan S signatories.
Under the CC BY 4.0 licence, third parties — including individual readers, libraries, institutions, commercial and non-commercial users, and machine systems — are permitted to:
— Share the article (copy and redistribute it in any medium or format)
— Adapt the article (remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, including commercial purposes)
These permissions are granted irrevocably, provided that the user:
— Gives appropriate credit to the original author(s)
— Provides a link to the licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
— Indicates if any changes were made to the original work
— Does not imply that the original author endorses the user's adaptation
The full legal text of the CC BY 4.0 licence is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
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5. Rights retained by authors
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GJEFM operates a strict author-retention copyright model. Authors retain full copyright in their published work. No copyright transfer is required, requested, or accepted.
Specifically, upon acceptance and publication, authors retain:
5.1 Full copyright in the work, including the right to reproduce, distribute, adapt, and re-use the work in any form and any medium.
5.2 The right to be named as the author of the work in all subsequent reproductions and adaptations (the moral right of attribution).
5.3 The right to deposit any version of the work — preprint, accepted manuscript, or final published version (Version of Record) — in any institutional repository, subject repository, preprint server, personal academic web page, or academic networking site, without embargo or restriction.
5.4 The right to reproduce the work in subsequent publications (such as books, theses, edited volumes, conference proceedings) without seeking permission from the publisher, provided that the original publication in GJEFM is acknowledged.
5.5 The right to use the work in teaching, including reproducing the work in course materials, lecture slides, and educational platforms.
5.6 The right to use the work in patent applications, grant applications, and other professional contexts.
What the publisher receives in exchange is a non-exclusive licence to publish, distribute, archive, and disseminate the article. This licence is non-exclusive — it does not prevent the author from also publishing or licensing the work elsewhere.
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6. Self-archiving and repository deposit rights
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Authors are explicitly permitted, and actively encouraged, to deposit any version of their published article in:
— Institutional repositories operated by their employer or alma mater
— Subject-specific repositories (such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SSRN, RePEc, PsyArXiv, Zenodo, OpenAIRE)
— Personal academic web pages
— Academic networking sites (such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu)
— Government or funder-mandated repositories (such as Europe PMC, PubMed Central, NIH Manuscript Submission)
No embargo period applies to any of these deposits. Authors may deposit the published version (Version of Record) immediately upon publication. Authors are encouraged to use the CrossRef DOI as the canonical identifier when depositing.
The journal is registered, or is in the process of registration, with Sherpa Romeo, which provides the standardised representation of self-archiving rights to institutional repository systems worldwide.
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7. Funder compliance
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GJEFM's open access policy is designed to satisfy the requirements of all major research funders and government open access mandates, including:
— Plan S (cOAlition S), the coalition of European and global research funders requiring full and immediate open access to research publications
— The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy
— The U.S. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy 2022 OSTP Memorandum
— The Wellcome Trust open access policy
— UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access policy
— The European Commission's Horizon Europe open science requirements
— The Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) open access policies
— The Canadian Tri-Agency open access policy
— Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation open access policy
Authors funded by these or similar funders may publish in GJEFM with confidence that the journal's licensing, deposit, and access provisions meet or exceed funder requirements.
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8. Indexing and discoverability
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GJEFM works systematically to ensure that published articles are discoverable through major academic indexing systems. Article-level metadata is supplied to:
— CrossRef — at the time of DOI registration, providing the foundational metadata layer that downstream systems consume
— Google Scholar — through standardised metadata in HTML <meta> tags using the citation_* prefix recognised by Google Scholar's harvester
— OAI-PMH harvesters — via the journal's OAI-PMH endpoint, which exposes article metadata in Dublin Core format
— OpenAIRE, Europe PMC, BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), and other federated open-science discovery platforms
Application for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, and Web of Science is part of the journal's ongoing indexing strategy.
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9. Long-term preservation
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GJEFM ensures the long-term preservation of published content through participation in the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS distributed preservation networks. Both services are listed in the Keepers Registry, the international registry of trusted preservation services. Combined with CrossRef DOI assignment and publisher-side redundant backups, this provides multiple independent mechanisms for ensuring permanent access to published research.
For full preservation arrangements, see the Long-term Digital Preservation page.
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10. Article processing charges
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GJEFM charges a single, flat Article Processing Charge (APC) of 30 USD per accepted article. This is dramatically below the industry average of $1,500-$3,000 per article and is among the lowest APCs in legitimate open access publishing. Full APC waivers are available for student authors and for researchers without active research funding.
For full details of the APC structure, payment process, and waiver programmes, see the Article Processing Charge (APC) page.
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11. Policy governance and revisions
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This open access policy is reviewed annually by the Editorial Board and the publisher (EP Journals Group). Any material changes are communicated to authors and readers through the journal's announcements page and reflected in the version history at the foot of this document.
The policy may not be unilaterally weakened in ways that affect already-published content. Articles published under this policy retain their CC BY 4.0 licensing in perpetuity.
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12. Contact and publisher information
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Publisher: EP Journals Group
Publisher website: https://www.ep-journals.org
Editorial contact: editor@ep-journals.org
Journal: Global Journal of Education, Finance and Management (GJEFM)
Identifiers: e-ISSN 3117-6771, p-ISSN 3117-6763
For policy questions, complaints, or appeals related to open access provisions, contact editor@ep-journals.org. The publisher commits to responding to substantive policy enquiries within five working days.
Last reviewed: 2026
Policy version: 1.0
