ESTONIAN ACADEMY
PUBLISHERS
eesti teaduste
akadeemia kirjastus
PUBLISHED
SINCE 1984
 
Oil Shale cover
Oil Shale
ISSN 1736-7492 (Electronic)
ISSN 0208-189X (Print)
Impact Factor (2022): 1.9

open access

The Oil Shale is committed to Open Access publishing, and belongs to the so-called Gold Open Access group of journals (see the ‘Copyright and Licensing Policy’ section for further explanation). From January 2022 the journal applies the least restricting Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) to all its articles. It means that all articles become freely accessible once published. This allows anyone to read, download, save, copy, print and distribute the paper in any medium or format, and remix, transform and build upon the paper for any purpose, including commercially, as long as the original authors and source are cited. In doing so, no permission is required from the authors or the publishers. For full details on Creative Commons licensing conditions check https://creativecommons.org

copyright and licensing policy

Creative Commons License

The Oil Shale is an international Open Access journal and from January 2022 the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) is applied to all its papers.

No transfer of copyright is necessary in order to publish a paper in the journal. The authors grant the journal a license to publish their work worldwide in all media and formats and identify itself as the original publisher. In addition, authors grant the journal the right to edit and make technical modifications to their work as deemed necessary by the publisher for the purposes of publication in the journal. The authors (or the holder of the authors’ copyright) retain full rights over their work, with acknowledgement of its original publication in the journal.   

By submitting manuscripts the authors agree that the article, if accepted and published, will become licensed under CC BY 4.0. This allows anyone to read, download, save, copy, print and redistribute the paper in any medium or format, and remix, transform and build upon the paper for any purpose, including commercially, as long as the original authors and source are cited. In doing so, no permission is required from the authors or the publishers. For full details on Creative Commons licensing conditions check http://creativecommons.org

For any reuse or redistribution of an article, users should also make clear the license terms under which the work was published.

If you wish to include any previously published figures or tables, written permission (for both the print and online formats) must be obtained from the copyright holder prior to submission, except for publications with open access licences. Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure/table caption.

All articles in Vol. 38, Issues 1, 2, 3 and 4, 2021 were licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license CC BY-NC 4.0.

Copyright owner of the articles published before 2021 is the Estonian Academy Publishers.

ethical requirements for the submitted paper

All research or methodologies identified as being conducted or developed by the authors or institutions have in fact been so conducted or developed.

Relevant prior and existing research and methodologies will be properly identified and referenced using the standard bibliographic and scientific conventions.

All the content of the submitted paper shall be the original work of the authors and shall not plagiarize the work of others. Short quotes from the work of others should be properly referenced with full bibliographic details of the quoted work. To quote or copy text or illustrations beyond a ‘short quote‘ will require the author to obtain permission from the rights holder.

Duplicate submission of the same paper to more than one scholarly journal while the decision from another journal on that same paper is still pending is prohibited as well as reporting the same results in somewhat different form.

Authors should take care not to defame other researchers in a personal sense.

Co-authors should be properly and appropriately identified. To be identified as co-author, however, the participant should have contributed to the conception and design of the project, drafted substantive portions of the paper and taken responsibility for the analysis and conclusions of the paper. Other participants with less responsibility should be identified and acknowledged for their contributions.

policy on the use of AI tools

Estonian Academy Publishers has made the two following adjustments to its selection criteria to cover the use of AI by our authors: 

  • AI tools cannot be listed as an author.   
  • The use of AI tools, including the name of the tool and how it was used, should be disclosed in the text of the manuscript. This note could be in the Materials and Methods, a statement at the end of the manuscript, or another location that works best for the format of the manuscript.   

preprint policy

We accept manuscripts already posted to a preprint server but kindly ask you to make us aware of that in the covering letter. Please include a link to the preprint, and as appropriate, state how the manuscript has been adjusted/updated between deposition and submission.

archival policy

Digital copies of all issues and individual papers published in the Oil Shale are deposited in digital archive of the National Library of Estonia DIGAR.

article publication charges

All articles published in the  Oil Shale are freely available to read, download, re-use and share.

When submitting an article to the Oil Shale, the corresponding author agrees to pay the article processing charges (APC). Article processing charges (standard article publication fee or ‘fast track‘ fee, the excess page fee and cost of colour illustrations) are payable by the author, their institution or funder of the research.

Invoice with the banking data will be sent to the corresponding author. Prompt payment is advised, as the article will not be sent to the production cycle until payment is received. Payment should be made in Euro to the bank account of the Estonian Academy Publishers.

To partly cover the publication costs of the papers, the Estonian Academy Publishers charges a standard publication fee of €300 per publication of papers up to 20 printed pages. For all papers longer than 20 printed pages, an additional charge of €50 will be requested for each extra page. Authors will be asked to cover the full cost for reproduction of colour artwork at a rate of €45 for one printed page. Colour figures online will be published free of charge.

DescriptionEUR
Standard article fee (max. 20 printed pages)300
Excess page fee (printed page)50
Colour illustrations (one printed page)45

No handling fee is applied to the manuscripts rejected by the publisher.

The publication fee of articles up to 20 printed pages will be waived by the Estonian Academy of Sciences to the authors whose work was supported by Estonian granting agencies or other Estonian funding bodies and the authors have explicitly stated this information in the Acknowledgement section. The Editorial board has right to release authors from paying publication fee by way of exception. Requests for waivers of publication and/or excess page fees should be presented in the covering letter.