Open access policy

This policy is a promise to readers and authors. It describes the guarantees every paper on Synapse carries, and it changes only in ways that strengthen them.

Every paper is free to read

No paper on Synapse is ever behind a paywall, a registration wall, or a metering system. Reading requires no account and no payment. This applies to every paper, forever, including after an author closes their account.

Every paper carries an open license

Authors choose one of three licenses when publishing:

• CC-BY 4.0 (default): share and adapt with credit to the author.
• CC-BY-SA 4.0: same as CC-BY, adaptations carry the same license.
• CC0 1.0: public domain dedication, no rights reserved.

We do not offer NonCommercial or NoDerivatives licenses. Work that cannot be translated, taught from, or built upon is not open, and open is the point.

Authors keep their rights

Publishing on Synapse grants us only the non-exclusive right to host and display your work under the license you chose. You remain the copyright holder. You may republish your work anywhere, anytime, with no exclusivity and no embargo.

No fees in either direction

We charge no article processing fees, no submission fees, and no reader subscriptions. If that ever changes for any future service, the guarantees above still hold for publishing and reading papers.

Open metadata

Titles, abstracts, bylines, topics, and citation data are part of the open record. We treat this metadata as public domain so that search engines, indexes, and research tools can use it without asking.

Mirroring and reuse

The licenses papers carry make copying legal by design. Anyone may crawl, mirror, or archive the public corpus, within the bounds of each paper's license and reasonable rate limits. Open access that cannot leave the platform is not open access.

Permanence

Published papers receive a permanent public link. Authors may unpublish their own work at any time; this is an author right we will not remove. We work toward long-term archival of the public corpus so that openly licensed research outlives the platform itself.

If Synapse ever shuts down, we will give public notice, keep the corpus readable long enough for authors and archives to copy it, and release a final archive under the papers' licenses.