Rights and Permissions

Rights Granted

Exclusivity	Moocat.net maintains exclusive electronic rights for 90 days following the date of publication.
Reversion	After the 90-day exclusivity period, all rights revert to you. You may republish the work elsewhere, provided moocat.net is credited as the original publisher.
Archival Rights	You grant moocat.net a perpetual, non-exclusive license to maintain the work in its digital archive.

Editorial Control and Final Approval

Rights are not officially granted or “signed” until a final, edited version of the work is approved by both the Editor and the Author.

Conditional Acceptance	Initial selection of a piece constitutes a “Conditional Acceptance.” This is an invitation to begin the editorial process.
Iterative Editing	I reserve the right to request revisions. This is a collaborative process; you will have the opportunity to review and approve all final copyedits.
Withdrawal	If a mutual agreement on revisions cannot be reached, either party may withdraw the piece prior to the final grant of rights.

The Submission Process

Submissions are processed either offsite, on Duotrope, using the Duosuma submission management system, or locally, on this site, depending on the section. For some sections, you can choose between the two submission paths. Your work will be reviewed only by moocat.net editors.

Conditional Acceptance

If we like your submission but would like to see changes, we may offer a Conditional Acceptance, which basically means, “This piece is good and maybe 90% there, but it requires revision for us to consider publishing it.” Conditional Acceptance is not Final Acceptance or a guarantee that your piece will be accepted for publication. If you don’t wish to accept that status, you’re free to withdraw the piece, or we can decline it.

Final Acceptance

Some pieces are accepted exactly as submitted — most often, poems. We’ll send you a Final Acceptance email if we accept your piece as written or if it moves past the finish line of publication readiness, in our judgment, after requested revisions. Trivial changes like fixes for typos or misspellings may still be made, but you will see them before the piece goes live.

Simultaneous Submissions

Upon receiving a Conditional Acceptance, authors must notify other editors of the piece’s withdrawal within 48 hours.

Editorial Exclusivity

To protect the time invested in iterative editing, the work remains exclusive to moocat.net during the collaborative phase until either a final grant of rights is signed or the piece is formally withdrawn.

If We Publish Your Work

• Your work will appear on the moocat.net site and also in the print version for that issue.
• We will lay out your piece and correct any small errors like punctuation, spelling, capitalization, or formatting, and may make minor adjustments for house style.
• We will send you layout proofs for your review — the Web version via a password-protected link, and the print version via a PDF.
• To maintain a good variety of content, we generally don’t publish the same contributor in consecutive issues. Please wait at least one issue after publication before submitting again.

Copyright

You retain full copyright in your work.

Electronic rights. By accepting a formal offer of publication, you grant moocat.net First Worldwide Serial Electronic Rights and a perpetual, non-exclusive license to maintain the work in its digital archive. Moocat.net holds exclusive electronic rights for 90 days following publication, after which all rights revert to you and you may republish the work elsewhere, provided moocat.net is credited as the original publisher.

Print rights. You also grant moocat.net a non-exclusive license to reprint the work in print and PDF anthologies of moocat.net content, including for-sale editions, for as long as the anthology remains in print. This license does not affect your right to publish the work elsewhere in any form.

Withdrawal of Simultaneous Submissions

Upon accepting an invitation for Conditional Acceptance, you agree to immediately withdraw the work from all other publications and venues currently considering it. The work must remain under exclusive consideration by moocat.net until the final grant of rights is confirmed or the piece is withdrawn by either party.

AI Disclosure and Warranty

By submitting, you warrant that the work is your original creation. You must disclose the use of any Generative AI tools used in the creation or editing of the work within the submission form metadata.