Terms of Use

Your access to and use of this website and its services are subject to these Terms of Use. By accessing or using this website or its services after being given notice of these Terms, including by downloading or printing articles, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, please discontinue use of the website and its services immediately.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Journal, the Publisher, and their respective employees, editors, and representatives shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive loss or damage arising out of or in connection with access to or use of this website or materials published by the Journal, whether or not advised of the possibility of such loss or damage.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, website content and materials published by the Journal are provided "as is" and "as available." No warranty or representation of any kind, express or implied, is given regarding merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, completeness, currency, or absence of errors.

Statements, opinions, findings, methods, and conclusions presented in articles are those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of, or constitute endorsement by, the editors or the Publisher. Information published by the Journal or on this website is provided for scholarly and informational purposes and is not intended as medical, legal, or other professional advice. Nothing on this website constitutes a recommendation or endorsement of any third party, product, service, qualification, or claim.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Publisher and the Journal, and their respective employees, editors, and representatives, from third-party claims, liabilities, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising directly from your unlawful use of the website or your material breach of these Terms.

Scope and Applicability Across Platforms

These Terms govern access to and use of all articles, figures, tables, PDFs, and related materials published by the Journal ("Journal Materials"). These Terms apply whether Journal Materials are accessed directly through this website or through any third-party archive, repository, platform, or database—including PubMed Central (PMC)—where these Terms or the article's licence statement are linked, referenced, or incorporated. Accessing, viewing, or retrieving Journal Materials from any platform—including via third-party bulk download mechanisms or APIs—after receiving notice of these Terms constitutes binding agreement to them.

Download Restrictions and Misuse

The Creative Commons or other publication licence accompanying an individual article governs the permitted reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and reuse of that article. These Terms separately govern access to, retrieval from, and use of this website, its archives, articles hosted on third-party platforms (including PubMed Central), and all underlying systems and infrastructure.

Unless expressly authorized in writing by the Publisher, users must not systematically, repeatedly, or in bulk access, download, scan, scrape, crawl, extract, harvest, analyze, index, copy, or retrieve multiple articles or PDFs—whether directly from this website or via third-party hosting platforms (such as PubMed Central) that link to or incorporate these Terms. This prohibition applies equally to manual collection of multiple articles and to automated methods, including scripts, bots, spiders, artificial intelligence systems or models, and data-mining tools.

Authorization to access or retrieve Journal Materials via third-party platforms, APIs, or archives (including PubMed Central's authorized retrieval mechanisms) does not grant permission to bypass these Terms. Users retrieving materials from third-party platforms remain strictly prohibited from using such materials for mass archive creation, AI training or fine-tuning, bulk automated AI processing, targeted harassment, doxxing, defamation, or deceptive misrepresentation against the Publisher, Journal, or their representatives.

Users must not use the website, or materials or information obtained through it, to harass, threaten, intimidate, impersonate, defame, unlawfully disclose personal information (doxxing), or otherwise target the Publisher, Journal, or any of their employees, editors, reviewers, authors, or representatives, including through coordinated or targeted online activity. Furthermore, users must not knowingly fabricate, falsify, materially misrepresent, or deceptively alter website content or publication materials—nor selectively edit or present such materials in a manner that creates a materially false or misleading impression—for the purpose of making deceptive allegations against, or causing unlawful harm to, the Publisher or its affiliates.

Governing Law & Jurisdiction

These Terms apply to the maximum extent permitted by Australian law and are not intended to restrict any activity that cannot lawfully be restricted.

These Terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia. You submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New South Wales and any courts in Australia competent to hear appeals from those courts.

Licence and Copyright

These Terms of Use govern access to and use of this website and its services. Except for individual articles expressly distributed under a Creative Commons or other publication licence, the website itself and its other content, including its design, layout, text, graphics, databases, and other materials, are protected by copyright. Such content may not be reproduced, systematically copied, scanned, scraped, harvested, downloaded, stored, or otherwise collected except as permitted by these Terms, an applicable licence, or applicable law, or with prior written permission from the Publisher.

Each article is subject to the copyright and licence terms stated in or accompanying that article.

Where these Terms of Use and an applicable Creative Commons or other publication licence address different matters, both apply. In the event of any conflict or inconsistency between these Terms of Use and any other policy, notice, or platform agreement—including PubMed Central rules—these Terms of Use shall prevail regarding access to, retrieval from, and use of the website, its services, and its infrastructure. An applicable Creative Commons publication licence shall prevail solely regarding the downstream reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and reuse of an individual article.

Unless otherwise stated in the individual article, articles published on or after June 10, 2019 are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0), subject to these Terms of Use.

Articles published before June 10, 2019 were generally distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), with copyright held by the Publisher, unless otherwise stated in the individual article, and subject to these Terms of Use.

Users should refer to the copyright and open-access statement accompanying each article to determine the rights and conditions applicable to that article. Third-party material contained within an article may be subject to separate copyright or licensing terms.

Permission Request

Reproducing Figures and Tables in Other Journals

No separate permission from our publisher is required to reproduce individual figures or tables in another academic journal or in a scholarly book, provided that the copyright is held by our publisher and the original publication is fully and properly cited. This provision does not apply to third-party material, republication of an article in its entirety or in substantial part, or reuse outside the scholarly publications described above.

Author Reuse Rights

Authors and co-authors do not need permission to include their published article in full in a thesis or dissertation, or to reuse their original figures, tables, or excerpts in subsequent scholarly journal articles or books. Full citation of the original publication is required. These rights do not extend to third-party copyrighted material included in the article.

Privacy

Information relating to visits to this website, including IP addresses, referring websites, dates and times of access, and technical information concerning website access, may be collected for website operation, administration, security, and related purposes.

Personal information submitted through forms or otherwise provided to the Publisher may be collected, used, stored, and disclosed for purposes connected with journal publishing, administration, communications, website operation, security, and other legitimate activities of the Publisher, in accordance with applicable privacy law and the Publisher's Privacy Policy.

Personal information may, where necessary, be processed by service providers acting on behalf of the Publisher. Users should refer to the Publisher's Privacy Policy for further information concerning the collection, use, storage, disclosure, access, and correction of personal information and the handling of privacy-related enquiries or complaints.