In the interest of helping our contributors retain intellectual property rights to their creative works as much as possible, the Forum does not ask authors to assign copyright to the Forum. Instead, authors merely grant the Forum a non-exclusive license to publish the article, to reprint it in any medium and to add formatting to it. The Forum will not substantially alter or delete the text of the article without the author's consent. The Forum will indicate in the publication that the work is copyrighted by the author. The Forum does not require the right of first publication, but asks that authors agree to include in any later publication a notice that the article is reprinted from the Forum, and, if published electronically, a hypertext link to the Forum.

As one way of cutting down the time between the submission of a piece and, if accepted, its publication, the Forum will, at the author's option, accept and sign its publication agreements either in traditional paper form, or electronically, using cryptographic signing techniques such as those found in Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). The Forum's Executive Board believes that the non-repudiability, authenticability and inalterability such systems provide are sufficient for the contractual purposes of executing our Publication Agreement. Please contact us if you have any questions about this option.

Our Publication Agreement is available for inspection on-line from the link below.