About the Author's Grant of Permission and the CCAL

The "Author's Grant of Permission to Publish a Paper" replaces the IEEE Copyright Form that was required in 2005 and previous years. Until 2006, proceedings of Computers in Cardiology ("CinC") were published by the IEEE (and, before 1995, by the IEEE Computer Society). Those who have registered for previous meetings of CinC have received printed volumes of proceedings, and the IEEE currently sells additional copies of the most recent volumes to libraries and non-attendees at US$270 each (half-price to IEEE members). CinC papers published between 1988 and 2005 can also be read on the IEEE's members-only web site, IEEExplore.

Beginning in 2006, CinC is an open access publication published by CinC itself. By self-publishing the proceedings, we can circulate CinC papers at reasonable cost to a world-wide audience. CinC proceedings will be available in print at much lower cost (estimated to be US$40) and on-line at no cost. Papers published in this way will be discoverable and full-text searchable via major search engines such as Google. Proceedings published by CinC will remain permanently available, not only on the web, but also in hard copy, using print-on-demand services in North America and Europe. These changes have been motivated by the desire to make CinC papers much more visible throughout the research, medical, and academic communities. We remain grateful to the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society for their steadfast support throughout the first 32 years of CinC, and we greatly appreciate the continued technical sponsorship of CinC by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

The IEEE (and the IEEE Computer Society) have required authors to assign their copyrights to the publishers. CinC will not ask authors to relinquish their copyrights, but we do need your permission in order to include your paper in CinC proceedings in print and on the web. The form of permission we ask for this purpose is the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5 ("CCAL"), which has already been adopted by most of the leading open access journals in science and medicine. For a thoughtful and detailed discussion of the issues surrounding open-access publishing and the choice of the CCAL, see this editorial that appeared in PLoS Biology in July 2004.

Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their papers, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their papers, so long as the original authors and source are credited. This broad license was developed to facilitate open access to, and free use of, original works of all types. Applying this standard license to your work will ensure your right to make your work freely and openly available.

Please note when reading the summary and legal code of the CCAL that it is addressed to the readers, rather than to the authors. Within the CCAL, the authors are referred to as the "Licensor" or as the "Original Author", and the readers are referred to as "You".