Open Access Policy

1. Statement of Commitment

AL-MAQASID: The International Journal of Maqasid Studies and Advanced Islamic Research is a fully open-access journal. We believe that the free exchange of knowledge is an "unprecedented public good" that accelerates research, enriches education, and fulfills the Maqasid (objective) of preserving and disseminating intellect (‘aql) for the benefit of humanity.

2. The BOAI Definition of Open Access

In accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), AL-MAQASID defines "Open Access" as:

"Its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

3. Licensing and Copyright

To ensure the widest possible reuse of scholarly work while protecting author integrity, AL-MAQASID adheres to the following:

  • Licensing: All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. This permits others to share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to adapt, remix, and build upon it, for non-commercial purposes only, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and source.

  • Author Rights: Authors retain full copyright of their work without restrictions. The journal is granted a non-exclusive right to publish the Version of Record.

4. Immediate Access (No Embargo)

There is no embargo period. All peer-reviewed research articles, editorials, and reviews are made available on the journal’s website immediately upon publication. We do not charge readers or their institutions for access.

5. Self-Archiving Policy (Green Open Access)

Consistent with the BOAI strategy of self-archiving, AL-MAQASID encourages authors to deposit all versions of their work in institutional or subject-specific repositories:

  • Pre-print: The version before peer review.

  • Post-print: The accepted version after peer review.

  • Version of Record: The final published PDF. We recommend that authors provide a link to the original publication via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

6. Transparency and Equity

Following the BOAI 20th Anniversary Recommendations, AL-MAQASID is committed to:

  • Community-Led Publishing: Prioritizing the needs of the scholarly community over commercial interests.

  • Inclusive Access: Ensuring that Article Processing Charges (APCs), if applied, do not become a barrier to authors from low-income regions or independent scholars through a robust waiver program.