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Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record. 

Permission for Reuse of Copyrighted Material

Permission for all copyrighted material must be obtained before submission, and appropriate acknowledgment given to the original source in the manuscript.

For permission to reuse copyrighted material from a published Journal of Paleontology paper, please see our Request Permissions page.

Declaration of Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their main manuscript file. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article. 

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. 

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. 

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”. 

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated. 

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

Open Access Policies

Gold Open Access. Authors or their institution may purchase Gold OA for their article by paying an Article Processing Fee (APC) of $2,000 ($1,000 for Society members). This option allows authors to post and distribute the article (high-resolution e-book pdf reprint) freely once the article processing charge (APC) is paid in full and a final PDF of the article is available. In addition, articles with Gold Access will be free to anyone for download on all affiliated Paleontological Society Web Sites (currently the journal's member web pages at Cambridge Core, plus BioOne, and GSW). Gold Open Access articles will be published under the terms of the CC-BY- NC 3.0 license by default or CC-BY 3.0 license upon request.

Green Open Access. Authors of all articles published in the Journal of Paleontology or Paleobiology may freely post (e.g., to personal and institutional web sites) and distribute freely the final accepted manuscript file (not the pdf of the published article) under Green Open Access, 12 months after its publication. Postings must include a link to the relevant article abstract online at www.cambridge.org/core. Green Access fulfills the requirement of most funding agencies to make published results and data available to the public after a 12 month embargo period, but not before the 12 month embargo period has ended. Under no circumstances may the publisher's final version (online PDF or article) be posted or distributed under the terms of Green Open Access. All regular copyrights will apply. 

Please see our Green Open Access page for more information. 

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.