Open Access & Licensing

All CARDINAL articles are published diamond open access: free for authors to publish and free for readers to access, with no subscription, paywall, or article processing charge.

License

Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license unless a specific article page states otherwise, permitting reuse with attribution.

Fee waivers

Because there is no APC, there is nothing to waive for low-income-institution authors by default — the zero-cost model is the fee-waiver policy. Authors may still self-declare institutional context during submission for internal reporting purposes.

This policy page is a Phase 0/1 deliverable published ahead of DOAJ application, per the platform roadmap.