Terms and conditions

By submitting a manuscript to Quantum, you agree with Quantum’s terms and conditions. In particular, you certify that:

you have the permission of all co-authors and other right holders to pursue publication of the work in Quantum,

you are not infringing on anyone’s copyright with the material contained in your work,

you will be fully liable for any charges resulting from copyright infringement, and

you will not submit this work to any other publishing venue unless it is terminally rejected by Quantum.

In addition, authors, referees and members of all boards of Quantum commit to follow the Code of Conduct laid out here.

The above summary is just for informative purposes. The binding terms and conditions follow.

1. Preamble and definitions

Access to Quantum is subject to the following terms and conditions, which constitute a contract between Quantum and any user. By engaging in any form of interaction with Quantum or its members, the user accepts these terms and conditions in full.

We denote by “Quantum” the Association for the Promotion of Open Access Publishing in Quantum Science, legally known as

Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften

Müllnergasse 26, 1090 Wien, Austria

(ZVR-Zahl 941922539),

the journal Quantum, the website quantum-journal.org, and the online system provided to organize submission and peer review of works, as well as Quantum’s social media accounts.

We denote by “user” any person accessing, using, exchanging, downloading, or submitting any type of content or information with, from and to Quantum and all services it provides, interacting with Quantum in any way, or holding or exercising any function within Quantum.

A “work” submitted to Quantum refers to the actual manuscript as publically available on arxiv.org (“the arXiv”), as well as all supporting material, such as, but not limited to, appendices, supplementary information, a popular summary, datasets, computer code, images, plots, videos or other recordings that are transmitted or made available to Quantum in order to assess the manuscript’s suitability for publication. This refers to both the manuscript and material present in the initial submission, as well as all further versions and additions of material in later resubmissions.

The “submitter” is anyone who carries out the submission of a work to Quantum for publication, either through the provided online system or via email, and who is identified by their account in the online system or name and address used in the email. In case of multiple submitters, the definition applies in full to every single one of them.

2. Code of conduct

Quantum fosters scientific integrity and ethical conduct. Consistent with the bylaws of Quantum (such as the constitution of the Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften), its code of conduct upholds those values, detailing the ethical guidelines and expectations for participation in Quantum. Authors, referees, editors, all board members and all other users of Quantum are expected to act at all times in accordance with the principles and standards described in this code.

Unacceptable behaviour

In particular, the code of conduct specifies behaviour that Quantum deems unacceptable, both in interactions with Quantum and in professional life in general. This includes but is not limited to:

Plagiarism and fabrication of data and results, including misrepresentation of contributions and authorship, selective reporting, failure to promptly correct errors, or theft of data and/or other research materials, as well as misrepresentation and overstatement of results and the omission of crucial conditions and assumptions. Publication (or submission for publication) of works submitted to or published in Quantum to other publishing venues, unless the work is terminally rejected by Quantum. “Other publishing venues” include other journals and conference proceedings, but exclude public pre-print servers such as the arXiv and personal or institutional websites of the authors. Re-publication of excerpts or the entirety of a work submitted to or published in Quantum as part of a work with a broader scope, such as a review article of thesis, is explicit allowed. Subversion of peer review, including failure to declare conflict of interest, failure to recuse under conflict of interest, misuse of information during review, unnecessarily delaying the peer-review process, violation of the anonymity of referees, premature solicitation of press coverage, corruption and/or bribery. Impersonation of other persons or entities, as well as unrightfully claiming the ownership of scientific titles, professional positions, or affiliations. Using Quantum or any other system for the dissemination of scientific works to promote hate or discriminatory speech, or to infringe on the rights of others. Sharing of confidential information, such as the identity of reviewers, referee reports, and other internal correspondence to persons not involved in the peer-review process. Discrimination of any kind, such as on the basis of religion, disability, age, national origin, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Discrimination includes the use of derogatory comments or slurs. Harassment, including bullying and intimidation, false accusations, threats and assault, as well as sexual harassment in public or in private. The violation of public trust, including making false or misleading statements, to media, and misrepresentation to grant and/or funding agencies.

Reporting and investigation

Quantum may learn of violations through reports from witnesses or aggrieved individuals and parties, including anonymous reports filed through the dedicated online form. For the safety of all reporters, once a report has been made, Quantum editors and board members are bound to maintain the confidentiality of the report except as explicitly requested by the reporting parties. Upon receiving a report, Quantum will progress as follows:

The Executive Board of Quantum will name an investigator or form a small investigation body of no more than three people, each of whom must be free of conflict of interest. The investigator or investigating body may solicit additional information from the reporter, with the goal of reaching a tentative conclusion over the course of two weeks. The tentative conclusion of the investigating body will be delivered to the Steering Board, along with a suggested resolution action as described in the section below. If the tentative conclusion and suggested resolution action are agreed upon by the Steering Board, Quantum will inform the reporter of their decision and seek agreement before proceeding. The party suspected of a violation of the code of conduct will be informed of the allegations and planned resolution action and given 20 working days to respond. Depending on the findings, on communication from the involved parties, and consensus of the Steering Board, the resolution action may be implemented or further investigations carried out with the aim of resolving the situation.

During the reporting and investigating process, all individuals must exercise all due diligence to prevent divulging any report details beyond those strictly necessary to enact and uphold the code of conduct. In particular, if upon receiving an initial report, it is deemed the alleged infraction would not result in a penalty more severe than a formal warning, the Executive Board may decide to directly handle the report without the aid of an investigating body, provided that no conflict of interest is introduced.

Enforcement and penalties

If a Quantum user is found through the preceding process to have committed any violation of the code of conduct, Quantum may enforce the code of conduct in a number of different ways. An appropriate resolution is decided by the Steering Board, taking into account all factors, and having as a goal to improve the situation. Possible actions to enforce the code of conduct include but are not limited to:

A formal (written) warning made to the infringing party. Requiring the infringing party to make a formal (written) apology. Reporting the infringing party to their home institutions, employers, and/or professional societies. Reporting the infringing party to the relevant authorities, in case of suspicion of criminal offences. Retraction of compromised manuscripts (based on scientific reasons). Refusal to consider future manuscripts from the infringing party. Expulsion from the Steering, Executive or Editorial Board.

3. Submission and publication of works

Works submitted to Quantum undergo the peer-review process following the Editorial Policies of Quantum. This process ends with either the acceptance of the work for publication, or the terminal rejection of the work.

Responsibilities of the submitter

By submitting a work to Quantum, the submitter warrants all of the following points and assumes full responsibility and liability for any costs and damages resulting directly or indirectly from any of them being untrue:

The submitted work is an original creation of the authors listed on the manuscript, and all listed authors have made substantial contributions to the creation of the work. The submitter has the permission of all authors and all other copyright and intellectual property rights holders to pursue the publication of the work in Quantum, and to grant Quantum all the rights specified in these terms and conditions. The manuscript is publicly accessible on the arXiv in the section quant-ph, or at least crosslisted to quant-ph. The work has not been previously published in any other journal or publishing venue, except in conference proceedings and on public pre-print servers such as the arXiv or the authors’ personal or institutional websites. Works previously published in conference proceedings must substantially differ from or expand upon the conference version (for example contain previously omitted proofs) and indicate the previous publication on the first page of the manuscript. The submitter has obtained permissions to grant Quantum the rights specified in these terms and conditions for all material contained in the work and has included appropriate credits and prominently marked or indicated any rights held by third parties. The submitter has clearly informed Quantum at the time of submission of any parts of the work which, due to copyright or other constraints, cannot be published by Quantum under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. In case of acceptance, the final published version of the work will be uploaded on the arXiv under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). In case of acceptance, the final published version of the work on the arXiv complies with the Crossref DOI guidelines. In particular, all references cited by the submitted work that have a DOI assigned to them contain DOI links. In case of acceptance and publication in Quantum, the work will not be submitted to other publishing venues, such as journals or conference proceedings.

Rights of the submitter

The submitter is granted the following rights:

At any point prior to acceptance the submitter, as well as any author of the work, can withdraw a work from Quantum. A notification of withdrawal has to be submitted to the handling editor either through the online submission system or by email. Upon receiving a notification of withdrawal prior to acceptance, Quantum terminally rejects the work, thereby ending the peer-review process. The submitter, as well as any author of the work, can also withdraw a work from Quantum after acceptance and publication by notifying Quantum through email. This however does not trigger a terminal rejection of the work and in particular does not invalidate the rights granted to Quantum during submission. Quantum will instead put a notification on the publication page that the work was withdrawn.

Internal correspondence

Unless explicitly agreed otherwise by all parts involved, all correspondence between editors, referees and authors during the peer review process should be treated as confidential, and may only be shared with the present and future Editorial Board members who have not declared a conflict of interest with the work.

Rights of Quantum

By submitting a work to Quantum, the submitter explicitly grants Quantum the following additional rights:

The right to terminally reject the work, in particular on the basis of the editors’ judgement and/or referee reports. The right to permanently store and share the work, referee reports, and intermediate correspondence with the referees and all current and future members of the Editorial Board who have not declared a conflict of Interest. The right to share the identity of the referees with all members of the current and future Editorial Boards who have not declared a conflict of Interest. The non-exclusive right to share, publish, host, distribute, print, advertise, classify, and otherwise use the manuscript, other parts of the work and all metadata associated with it under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, unless the work is terminally rejected by Quantum, expect for parts of the work that are covered by incompatible licences. This does not imply any restrictions on the right to publish parts or the entirety of the work of other parties. The right to deposit the metadata associated with the work in the Crossref system and to assign a DOI to the work. The right to publish anonymized statistics on submissions and the peer-review process.

Copyright of works published by Quantum

All manuscripts and other parts of works that were previously submitted to Quantum and then published by Quantum, as well as the associated meta-data, including for example a work’s title, abstract, author list, figures, datasets, or popular summary, are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

For material associated with a manuscript, such as that linked to from the manuscript, or a work’s page on Quantum’s website, especially if hosted on other platforms, other licences can apply.

Each owner of copyright on parts or the entirety of a work submitted to or published by Quantum retains their copyright.

4. Data protection and privacy policy

The purpose of this data protection policy is to inform all users of Quantum and this website about the type of personal data that is collected and processed by Quantum and the company providing the hosting infrastructure for this website, as well as the purpose of said data processing.

Quantum is taking data protection very seriously, and it is treating your personal data according to the legal requirements.

In particular, Quantum complies with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Please keep in mind that any data transmission over the Internet and any form of digital data processing can be affected by security flaws is software and hardware that are beyond the control of Quantum.

A complete protection from unauthorized access by third parties can thus never be fully guaranteed.

As Quantum does not fall in any of the categories of entities that are required to appoint a DPO according to the GDPR, it does not have a dedicated DPO.

Should you have any questions on this data protection and privacy policy, please contact us through one of the channels described in the impressum.

Personal data

Personal data is any information related to a natural person or data subject that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person.

This website collects personal data only to the extent necessary and in a way that is legally permissible (see below for more details).

Cookies

This website uses cookies. A cookie is a small file that is saved on the device with which you are accessing this website. Should you not want to be served a cookie when using this website, most common browsers can be configured to disallow the usage of cookies. This may affect the usability of this site (such as the ability to opt out of the data collection for analytics, see below).

Sharing buttons

The sharing buttons for sharing content on social media and other platforms displayed on this website are provided by the WordPress plugin Shariff Wrapper. By design, the Shariff Wrapper plug-in does not transmit any data to the social media platforms and other sharing services unless one of the sharing buttons is explicitly clicked. Shariff Wrapper’s statistics feature is disabled on this site, so that no personal data about sharing activity is stored.

Data stored and processed of all users

Quantum and the company hosting this website may collect, store, and process the following data of all users of Quantum:

visited pages time of access number of transmitted bytes link that lead to the page being accessed browser used operating system used ip address from which it was accessed data (text, files, tick boxes, …) entered in forms and search boxes

The data may be collected in server log files and for the purpose of analyzing how this website is being used (analytics) by means of the WordPress plug-in WP statistics.

Unless stated otherwise below, the data is saved exclusively on the servers of the company providing the hosting infrastructure for this website and on computers controlled by Quantum (for the purpose of archiving and backup) and can only be accessed through password protected accounts on these systems and is not shared with any third party service such as Google Analytics.

Unless stated otherwise below, the data collected in this way is used exclusively for statistical analysis and improvement of the website as well as to ensure its safe and lawful operation.

In particular, ip addresses are saved only in pseudo-anonymized form, either hashed or with the last block truncated.

If the WP statistics plug-in is enabled, you have the option to opt-out of the data collection for analytics by performing the following steps: (1) Clear all cookies for this website in your browser. (2) Refresh the page. (3) Click/tap the button “opt out” in the banner at the bottom of the page.

Data entered into or resulting from the use of forms and transmitted via email

Data entered into or resulting from the use of forms on this website and such sent to Quantum via email may be processed in additional ways.

In particular, it may be stored and processed on information technological devices controlled by members of Quantum as well as in password protected collaborative working and cloud computing platforms such as Jira, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Docs/Google Sheets.

For data relevant for the peer-review and publication process additional rules apply (see the next section for more details).

If the data entered in such forms is stored or processed of purposes other than those described in the last section, the form contains a more detailed description of the type and purpose of the data storage and processing.

You have to tick a tick box on such forms to express your explicit consent to such additional data storage and processing.

Data stored and processed for and during the peer-review and publication process

During the peer-review and publication process (which includes the handling of appeals) additional personal data is collected, stored, and processed by Quantum, as well as the third-party service < href="https://scholasticahq.com/">Scholastica, namely:

written communication with and between authors, editors, and referees the times and other meta-data associated with this communication the email addresses and account names at other services used to carry out this communication all data and material provided to Quantum by the submitter, including the submitted work

This this data is permanently stored by Quantum to ensure long-term accountability and justifiability of editorial decisions and to ensure a means of contacting the submitter or authors (e.g., in case of later corrections to published works).

Such data may further be stored and processed on the collaborative working platform Jira and the third-party service < href="https://scholasticahq.com/">Scholastica to the extent this is necessary to carry out and supervise the peer-review process.

On such platforms the data is accessible only through password protected accounts.

Quantum retains the right to process this data for the purpose of performing statistical analysis of the peer-review process, correlate this data with other publicly available information, and to publish such analysis and the underlying data in a suitably anonymized form.

In doing this, Quantum takes the utmost care to ensure that no personally identifying information is leaked and in particular that the anonymity of referees is guaranteed.

For accepted works, Quantum publishes the work itself (including all companioning material and meta-data) in accordance with the terms and conditions.

In particular, as part of its service, Quantum uploads the meta-data of accepted works, as well as parts or all of the work, to platforms such as Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Clarivate Analytics, and Clockss for the purpose of registering DOIs, making the work discoverable by readers, facilitate biometrics, and archiving.

Data on payments and donations

Data on payments of article processing charges and donations are obviously available to the handling services, such as the involved banks and, if applicable, PayPal. Such data is processed for accounting purposes in accordance with applicable law.

On top of that, Quantum practices public accounting. All donations and payed fees are made available in this publicly shared shared spreadsheet.

Data publicly available on this website

Data that is anyway publicly available on this website, my be share by Quantum in posts on social media platforms including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, either directly of by means of third-party services such as buffer.com or IFTTT in accordance with the license under which this data was published.

Backups

All data described above may be included in backups to ensure the continued availability of the services of Quantum. Such backups are stored “off-site”, i.e., in a different physical location than the production system on servers or storage systems controlled by Quantum or people working for Quantum and access to which is suitably restricted with passwords. The data in backups is not processed and is stored in such a way that it can not even be directly accessed from the production systems.

Data protection

Quantum uses strong and individual passwords for all accounts and services that can be used to access personal data of its users. Quantum uses individual email accounts for each third party service to ensure a fine grained access to personal data, restricted to only those members of Quantum who actually need access.

Data breach procedures

In case of a data breach that reveals otherwise not publicly available personal data in our own data handling systems or any of the third party services Quantum relies on, all identifiable users will be notified in due time after a suitable assessment of the situation.

User rights

As a user, you have the right to request information about which of your personal data is stored and processed by Quantum and for what purpose. You can demand that personal data is corrected (in case it is incorrect) or deleted (to the extend this is compatible with the terms and conditions of Quantum and applicable law), and have the right to obtain a digital copy of the stored personal data. To contact Quantum on such matters, please use one of the channels described in the impressum.

Data protection and privacy policy changes

Quantum may change its data protection and privacy policy from time to time, at Quantum’s sole discretion. Quantum encourages its users to check this page for changes frequently. Your continued use of any service Quantum provides, including but not limited to this website, after any change in this data protection and privacy policy constitutes your acceptance of such change.

5. Further aspects

Disclaimer of warranty

There is no warranty for the services provided by Quantum, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing, the copyright holders and/or other parties provide these services “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose or future availability. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the services is with the user. Should the services prove defective, the user assumes the cost of all damages incurred.

Limitation of liability

In no event, unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, will Quantum be liable to any user for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the services provided by Quantum, even if Quantum has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

External content

Links to other works, websites, or other documents, including but not limited to hyperlinks on the website quantum-journal.org as well as in manuscripts published by Quantum, may link to content that is beyond the control of Quantum. Quantum hence does not assume any kind of responsibility or liability for the content to which such links point or transmissions that can be received through them.

Infringement notification

In case you believe that any material published by Quantum infringes on your copyright or intellectual property rights in any way, you must contact in writing, in either English or German, the

Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften

Müllnergasse 26, 1090 Wien, Austria.

Logos, images and materials created by Quantum

The term “Quantum” and the Quantum logo are a registered trademark of the Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften in the European Union (EUIPO) for the publishing of scientific papers, electronic publishing, the publishing of journals, and several other categories of goods and services.

All other company and product names, logos, trademarks, registered trademarks, and brands are property of their respective owners. All such company, product and service names used in this website are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement.

The logo of Quantum, as well as all images created by Quantum, are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. The LaTeX template quantumarticle is published on GitHub under the LaTeX Project Public licence version 1.3c.

Right to modify terms and conditions

Quantum retains the right to modify these terms and conditions following consultation with the Steering Board. All submitters of works undergoing peer-review at the time of change must be notified if affected by the changes. Submitters are always bound to the version of these terms and conditions at the time of the last (re-)submission.

These terms and conditions, as well as the Editorial Policies and the Constitution of Quantum, are published under a Creative Commons “No Rights reserved” (CC0) licence. Sharing, tweaking and reuse of these policies is allowed and encouraged. If you adapt them to other projects, we would love to hear from you.