A change in the license terms of the journal articles in 2022

The Finnish Journal of eHealth and eWelfare has always been an open access journal. In the beginning, the journal had a three-month embargo period when only the members and authors had immediate access to the articles and all others had to wait for the newest articles. This embargo was removed in autumn of 2017. At the same time, the journal began to apply the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY NC ND 4.0).

The CC BY NC ND 4.0 license was chosen mainly to protect the rights of the authors for the commercial exploitation of their works. This license served the authors well in 2017 but the situation has changed. Since the beginning of the year 2021, the Academy of Finland has required that the scientists that it funds, publish their results in open access journals according to the principles of Plan S. Another important research financier, the European Union has also begun to require the open access publication of the research results it finances under the Creative Commons CC BY license. This is also the preferred license of the Academy of Finland. Thus, the license which was intended to protect the authors, has become a problem for them. For this reason, the editorial board has decided to adopt the CC BY license for all papers that are submitted to the journal after the publication of this announcement in February 2022.

This change makes our journal again an interesting publication forum for researchers financed by the Academy of Finland and the European Union. For readers, this change is not so bad either. Please, read the license terms of the CC BY license and see what you can now do with the articles published under this license.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
[2] https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/
[3] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/