Copyright Ownership

Medicine and Health operates on the principle that authors retain full copyright of their published work. Upon acceptance and publication, all articles are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license permits anyone to freely access, download, read, and share published articles at no cost, provided that the original published version is appropriately cited. Authors may also reuse their own published material in subsequent works without restriction. This approach is designed to maximise the visibility, accessibility, and impact of published research while ensuring that authors receive full and proper recognition for their intellectual contributions.

In exceptional cases where specific funding conditions or institutional requirements preclude the use of the standard CC BY-NC 4.0 license, authors are encouraged to notify the Medicine and Health Managing Editorial team at the earliest opportunity. Alternative licensing arrangements may be considered and granted at the discretion of the editorial management.

Reproducing Material from Other Publications

Authors are solely responsible for securing written permission to reproduce any previously published material, including figures, tables, charts, schemes, photographs, or substantial textual extracts, that is protected by copyright and for which they do not hold the rights. Permission must be sought directly from the copyright holder, which is typically the original publisher. Authors are advised to check the copyright notice of the relevant publication to identify the appropriate rights holder.

Permission is required when reproducing:

1. Your own previously published works where copyright was not retained by you and was transferred to another publisher.
2. Substantial portions of text, data, or ideas drawn from the works of others, whether from a single publication or across a series of works.
3. Tables, graphs, charts, schemes, or artwork that are reproduced in their original form or with only minor modifications.
4. Photographs or images for which you do not personally hold the copyright.

Permission is not required when:

1. You reconstruct your own table using data that has been previously published elsewhere, provided that the original data source is clearly acknowledged in the caption using the format “Data from…” or “Adapted from…”.
2. Short, reasonably brief quotations are used, as these are generally considered fair use under standard copyright principles.
3. Graphs, charts, schemes, or artwork have been entirely redrawn by the authors and are sufficiently transformed so as to be unrecognisable from the original.

How to Obtain Permission

Authors are strongly advised to begin the process of obtaining copyright permissions as early as possible to avoid any unnecessary delays in the publication timeline. When in doubt about whether permission is required, it is always prudent to seek it. Medicine and Health is unable to publish material reproduced from other sources without documented evidence of permission from the copyright holder.

Once permission is granted, authors must acknowledge the source of the reproduced material in accordance with any instructions provided by the copyright holder. In the absence of specific instructions, the following acknowledgement format should be used at the end of the relevant figure, table, or scheme caption:

“Reproduced with permission from [Author(s)], [Book/Journal Title]; published by [Publisher], [Year].”

All other content appearing on the Medicine and Health website, including but not limited to text, computer code, artwork, photographs, images, audio and video material, remains the property of Medicine and Health, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and its licensors.

Open Access Policy and the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Medicine and Health is a fully open-access journal, meaning that all published content is freely available to readers and institutions worldwide at no charge. There are no subscription fees, access barriers, or article processing charges imposed on readers. All users are permitted to freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full text of any article published in Medicine and Health, without the need to seek prior permission from the publisher or the authors.

This open-access policy is fully consistent with the definition and principles of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which advocates for the free, unrestricted online availability of peer-reviewed scholarly literature to support the global advancement of science and knowledge. By aligning with these principles, Medicine and Health reaffirms its commitment to making medical and health sciences research freely accessible to clinicians, researchers, educators, policymakers, and the public across the world.