Editorial Snapshot: The importance of copyright compliance in academic publishing
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- Published: 2024/12/18
Recently, Elsevier’s Ain Shams Engineering Journal retracted two papers after discovering that the authors used unlicensed software in their research. The papers, which explored dam failures, relied on FLOW-3D, a computational fluid dynamics application developed by Flow Science. The software’s creators filed a complaint after an editorial investigation revealed that the authors did not obtain a proper license for its use. The journal’s retraction notice emphasized that one of the core submission conditions is that research should not violate intellectual property rights, including the proper licensing of any software used.