This is determined by a publishing agreement between the author and Imedicine. Imedicine supports the need for authors to share, disseminate and maximize the impact of their research and these rights are defined as below by the proprietary of journals.

For subscription articles:
Authors have the right to share their article for personal use, internal institutional use and scholarly sharing purposes. Retain patent, trademark and other intellectual property rights.

For open access articles:
In this case authors have the right to share their article in the same way permitted to third parties under the relevant user license (together with personal use rights). Retain patent, trademark and other intellectual property rights (including raw research data).
Author warrants that he/she is the sole owner or has been authorized by any additional copyright owner to assign the right that the article does not infringe any third party rights and no license from or payments to a third party to publish the article and that the article has not been previously published or licensed. The author signs for and accepts responsibility for releasing this material on behalf of any and all co-authors.

The author can keep the version of the article in English in its own web site or his/her institution’s repository. However, published PDF version can't be used in www.imedicine.org.cn Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version whose acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link must be accompanied by the following text: “The original publication is available at www.imedicine.org.cn”.

Transfer of copyright becomes effective if and when a Copyright Transfer Statement is signed or transferred electronically by the corresponding author.The copyright to this article, including any graphic elements therein (e.g. illustrations, charts, moving images), is assigned for good and valuable consideration to Imedicine if and when the article is accepted for publication and assignability is restricted for by applicable law or regulations.

All articles published in this journal are protected by copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article (e.g., as offprints), as well as all translation rights. No material published in this journal may be reproduced photographically or stored on microfilm, in electronic data bases, video disks, etc., without first obtaining written permission from the publisher . The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, etc., in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.