MDM Policy & Practice
MDM Policy & Practice is a “Gold” Open Access (OA) journal. All published articles are freely available online under a Creative Commons (“CC”) license. Authors of accepted manuscripts pay an article processing fee to support open-access publication. MDM P&P is online only and is not published in print.
MDM P&P’s article processing charge (APC) is USD$2,500, payable on formal manuscript acceptance. A discounted rate of USD$2,000 is available for author teams with at least one author who is a current member of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).
Your institution may be able to help you to cover all or part of your article’s open access article processing charge (APC) if they have an Open Access agreement or open access prepaid account (OAPA) in place with SAGE. You may alternately be eligible for a discount due to your institutional affiliation. Please identify your affiliation after your paper is accepted for publication to check if any discounts of fee waivers are available to you.
As described in SAGE’s policy on Gold Open Access Article Processing Charge Waivers, SAGE provides partial and full waivers of the APC to authors who reside in the countries described by the Research4Life program. SAGE uses the corresponding author’s affiliation to automatically apply the R4L waivers in the SAGE Open Access Portal. The waiver will be automatically applied if the corresponding author is from an author on the current country list: https://www.research4life.org/access/eligibility/. Authors do not need to apply for or request a waiver as long as they disclosed on submission that they are from a country on the list. If an author from a listed country does not receive a waiver for an accepted article and believes that they do qualify, they should contact openaccess@Sagepub.com to check and apply.
Medical Decision Making
Medical Decision Making offers authors of primary research articles a hybrid open access (OA) option. Under the hybrid OA publishing option, called SAGE Choice, the article is published under a Creative Commons license, so that the article is freely accessible on the journal’s website and authors may further distribute the final published version of their article in accordance with the respective CC license, including depositing the published PDF version in their funding agency’s preferred archive, if applicable. Authors of accepted manuscripts who wish to publish their article under the SAGE Choice option pay an article processing fee. The SAGE Choice option will be made available by SAGE to authors of primary research articles only after acceptance of their paper for publication. The policy of delaying the offer of the OA option is intended to prevent any potential conflicts of interest, and to ensure that authors’ choice / funder requirements have no influence on the editorial peer review and decision-making process. Authors who do not wish to publish under SAGE Choice are under no pressure to do so, and their article will be published free of charge, in the usual manner. Please visit http://www.sagepub.com/sagechoice.sp for more information about the SAGE Choice program.
The article processing fee for MDM’s SAGE Choice option is USD$3000 for articles accepted in 2023. This fee will be USD$4200 for articles accepted in 2024 or later. Note, however, that some organizations have transformative agreements with SAGE publications that provide either discounts or waivers to the SAGE Choice fee.
For general information on open access at SAGE please visit the Open Access page or view SAGE’s Open Access FAQs.
SAGE’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines
The following section is a slightly edited copy of the guidelines presented on the SAGE Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines page. It is repeated here for author convenience.
These guidelines should be followed by authors of articles published in a SAGE subscription journal, including authors whose articles were published under a previous version of the author guidelines.
Three versions of the articles are referenced in these guidelines:
- Original Submission: the version submitted by the author before peer review
- Accepted Manuscript: version updated to include the author’s revisions after peer review, prior to any typesetting for the journal. This is often the version accepted by the editor
- Final Published PDF: copy-edited and typeset Publisher’s PDF, the same version published on the journal’s website
Sharing Gold Open Access Articles [Applicable to all MDM P&P articles and MDM articles published as SAGE Choice]
- You may share the Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript at any time after your paper is accepted and in any format.
- Once your article has been published, you may also share the Final Published PDF version in accordance with the CC license terms. The Creative Commons non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license is used with articles published as SAGE Choice, unless a different license is required by the author’s funding agency. Under the CC-BY-NC license, you may also share the Final Published PDF of your article for non-commercial purposes (e.g., by posting it in an a freely accessible archive) as long as you follow the constraints of the Creative Commons license. Your sharing may include posting a downloadable copy on any non-commercial website, saving a copy in any repository or network, sharing a copy through any social media channel, and distributing print or electronic copies.
Sharing Green Open Access Articles [Applicable to MDM articles NOT published using SAGE Choice]
You may share the Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript at any time after your paper is accepted and in any format. Your sharing of the Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript may include posting a downloadable copy on any website, saving a copy in any repository or network, sharing a copy through any social media channel, and distributing print or electronic copies.
For information on use of Institutional Repository (IR) copies by authors and IR users, see Posting to an Institutional Repository – Green Open Access.
[NOTE: This policy means that authors may not only submit their accepted manuscripts to repositories such as PubMedCentral immediately upon acceptance but that authors may instruct the repository to publicly release the work immediately thereafter. In other words, authors do NOT need to instruct PubMedCentral or similar repositories to embargo the work for any period of time.]
All authors, whether their article was published under the OA or traditional model, may use the Final Published PDF (or Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript, if preferred) in the following ways:
- in relation to their own teaching, provided that any electronic distribution maintains restricted access
- to share on an individual basis with research colleagues, provided that such sharing is not for commercial purposes
- in their dissertation or thesis, including where the dissertation or thesis will be posted in any electronic Institutional Repository or database
- in a book authored or edited by them, at any time after the article’s publication in the journal.
Provided that:
- Access to the Original Submission and Accepted Manuscript is provided at no charge.
- Any re-use terms for users of websites and repositories (where your Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript are posted) are restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses.
- You may not post the Final Published PDF on any unrestricted website or repository without permission from SAGE.
- You may not republish or translate any version of your Contribution in another journal without prior permission from SAGE.
- The journal as the original publication of your Contribution is appropriately credited by including the full citation information each time your Contribution, or excerpts, are further distributed or re-used:
- After your Contribution has been accepted for publication and until it is assigned a DOI, please include a statement that your Contribution has been accepted for publication in the journal.
- Once full citation information for your Contribution is available, please include this with your posted Contribution, in a format similar to the following:
Author(s), Contribution Title, Journal Title (Journal Volume Number and Issue Number) pp. xx-xx. Copyright © [year] (Copyright Holder). DOI: [DOI number].
Manuscript Production, Prepublication Policy, Publication, and Copyright
For Medical Decision Making, all authors, except government employees whose work was done as part of their official duties and is in the public domain, sign an agreement granting exclusive license to publish their article to the owner of Medical Decision Making, the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM). The exclusive license to publish includes assigning the rights for print and electronic publication as well as production of reprints, facsimiles, microfilm, or microfiche, and publication in languages other than English. (After publication, inquiries regarding permission to reprint that are not addressed in the author re-use terms should be directed to Copyright Clearance Center.) Once the author agreement has been signed, the prepublication versions of the manuscript and the published article are protected by MDM’s copyright at the time of publication and thereafter. However, authors may re-use and archive their paper according to the above guidelines without contacting SMDM or SAGE.
For MDM Policy & Practice, authors provide the SMDM with license to publish the article under a Creative Commons non-commercial (CC BY-NC) license, and unless a CC-BY license is required by their funding agency, the license transfers an exclusive license for commercial use to SMDM.
Signing the Publishing Agreement
Immediately on formal acceptance of the manuscript for publication, authors will be prompted to sign the publishing agreement for their article. Authors will receive an email prompting them to access the form in the SAGETrack manuscript software—at which point the corresponding author can log in to his or her Author Center (at MDM or MDM P&P) to read and sign the form. Government employees who are required to submit a different form must contact the MDM editorial office directly.
After signing the publishing agreement, an author may be contacted by the MDM editorial office to make any remaining minor changes to their article as may be required. Such changes may include editor suggestions from the final acceptance letter, changes to formatting, requests for alternate figure files, or a request for the submission of supplementary materials. The author will receive an e-mail from the First Look Center that details the remaining changes that are required. Instructions are provided so that the author can access the manuscript in ScholarOne First Look. If no changes are required, the manuscript skips First Look and is exported directly to SAGE Publications for production.
Production and Publication of Your Article
Once the preproduction process is complete and the editorial office forwards the manuscript to SAGE Publications for production, the production editor at SAGE Publications contacts the author with article proofs after the manuscript has been processed and typeset. This process may take up to one month from the time the manuscript is formally received by the publisher.
The electronic version of the article is published as soon as the final proofs are processed by the publisher. All MDM and MDM P&P articles are available via OnlineFirst after the production and proof process is complete and before the release of an article’s assigned issue. Authors are encouraged to sign up for SAGE contents alerts to receive immediate notification when the published article goes live—at which time authors may begin their self-promotion efforts. OnlineFirst articles may be cited using the online posting date and the assigned DOI number, which appear beneath the list of authors and article title (e.g., first published on March 3, 2013, doi:10.1177/0272989X12475091). Once an article appears in a print issue of MDM, its citation information is complete (i.e., volume, issue, and page numbers) and it joins the articles in its assigned issue, leaving OnlineFirst.
Research Articles Funded by the Wellcome Trust and National Institutes of Health
Some authors must comply with funding body requirements, such as those in place from the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health. The NIH Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research (i.e., public access policy) strongly encourages all investigators to make their NIH-funded, peer-reviewed, manuscript available to other researchers and the public through PubMedCentral at the National Library of Medicine by uploading the accepted manuscript (pre-typeset and pre-copyedited). Note that SAGE’s Green Open Access policy (see above) allows the PubMedCentral version of an article to be released immediately without any embargo period. In support of this policy, MDM encourages authors of accepted manuscripts that describe original research funded entirely or in part by a NIH grant to submit their manuscript to the NIH grantee site.
Authors of accepted manuscripts in MDM have two options for making their articles available to nonsubscribers. One option is to pay a SAGE Choice fee to SAGE Publications for the public release of the article. The other is to submit a prepublication version (i.e., the accepted manuscript) of the manuscript to PubMedCentral. If the latter approach is taken, authors should ask PubMedCentral to display prominently the following disclaimer:
This is the prepublication, author-produced version of a manuscript accepted for publication in Medical Decision Making. This version does not include post acceptance editing and formatting. Medical Decision Making is not responsible for the quality of the content or presentation of the author-produced accepted version of the manuscript or of any version that a third party derives from it. Readers who wish to access the definitive published version of this manuscript and any ancillary material related to this manuscript (correspondence, corrections, editorials, hyperlinked articles, etc.) should go to http://journals.sagepub.com/home/mdm. Those who cite this manuscript should cite the published version as it is the official version of record.