Publication Policies

Transfer of Copyright

• No paper can be presented at an SPE conference unless a signed copy transferring copyright is received by SPE before the manuscript due date.
• If you are employed and prepared this paper within the scope of your employment, the original copyright to the paper belongs to your employer.
  • If you sign the form, we assume you are authorized to do so by your employer and that your employer has consented to the transfer of copyright, to the representation and warranty of publication rights, and to all other terms and conditions of the form.
  • If such authorization and consent has not been given you, an authorized representative of your employer should sign this form in the space provided for the Author.
• Always use the form provided in the author kit for the conference as wording may vary for some jointly sponsored meetings.
• No modifications or substitutions will be accepted and we do not accept a license to distribute in place of full transfer of copyright.

Author-retained Rights

Transfer of copyright does not affect the underlying intellectual property or concepts, which remain with the author or the employer. Authors and their employers retain certain rights for reuse of the material.

Downloads

• Transfer of Copyright Form (pdf)
• More details about Copyright Requirements

• We require that authors provide a temporary transfer of copyright to facilitate the peer review process.
• If the paper is accepted for publication, a permanent transfer of copyright will be required.
• The author must agree not to submit the paper for review or publication elsewhere while under review by SPE.
• If the paper is not accepted for publication, full copyright will revert to the original owner, for papers that did not originate at an SPE conference.

Just because you are the author doesn’t mean that you can repeat long sections of your prior work in a new work. If you are writing a new paper, the content should be new, not a repeat of what you wrote in a prior paper.

No one will be concerned about the verbatim reuse of a few sentences or even a full paragraph, but you should not repeat full sections of a prior work. Just as you would summarize and cite the work of another author, you should summarize and cite your own prior work, then focus on what is new that led you to write the current paper.

SPE can grant permission to reproduce tables or figures provided that these elements are original to the paper. SPE cannot grant permission for material the author republished from another source. You will need to contact the original source for permission.

Each table or figure used in another publication should reference the source work in the references. For tables and figures from an SPE conference proceeding, journal paper, or book, locate the work in OnePetro and follow the “Get Permission” link. For material from SPE magazines send an email request to permissions@spe.org.

A fee will be charged in most cases unless you are the original author of the work.

Authors or their employer may distribute up to 50 printed copies of their SPE paper for educational or professional activities without notification to SPE. Please note, “employer” refers to the authors’ employer at the time the paper was written. This permission can be used multiple times (such as to distribute copies from an employer’s trade show booth or for use in a training course that the author is conducting).

If more than 50 copies are desired, locate the paper in OnePetro and follow the “Get Permission” link.

Requests from third parties to distribute copies for training courses or as papers in a collection may be granted upon payment of a fee. To request permission, locate the paper in OnePetro and follow the “Get Permission” link.

Storage or distribution of SPE copyrighted material by any individual or organization on a generally accessible internet site is not allowed. SPE does not support the creation of databases or storage locations for SPE papers by non-SPE entities.

• Authors or their employers may place a PDF of papers they have written on a company intranet site (internal access only). Papers may not be posted on any type of generally accessible internet site.

• SPE papers downloaded from OnePetro can be posted to limited access workspaces to be shared among project teams or a joint industry project if the number of people with access to the site does not exceed 50 and the papers are posted for the duration of the project only.

• For professors: University subscriptions to OnePetro are unlimited, so students may download copies of the papers for personal use. Your course materials site should include links to OnePetro for any SPE papers that are required reading. By having the students retrieve the papers themselves, you help them learn how to use this valuable resource and their downloads are counted to indicate the value of the work.

SPE will consider requests for use on a customer extranet or other limited access site on a case-by-case basis, and fees may apply. To request additional permission, contact permissions@spe.org.

• Open access papers (copyright line will say “Copyright, The Authors”) have a CC-BY license and do not require formal permission to reuse but should be properly attributed in your new work. Consult the CC-BY 4.0 license for more information.

• If the paper was written by US government employees in the course of their work, or was funded by the US government (as specified in the applicable contract), it is not subject to copyright. As such, reuse of material in the document does not require approval from the rightsholder.

• If the paper specifies Crown Copyright (typically, this would only be papers written by employees of the UK, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealand governments, and NOT work funded by those governments), copyright is held by the applicable government. To request reuse of material from these papers you must contact the appropriate government copyright organization to request permission.

• You may make up to five photocopies of a single article, or up to 15 pages from a book, to share with colleagues for one-time use. This cannot be used repeatedly to copy longer works in their entirety.

• You may provide a link from your website to material on SPE.org, OnePetro.org, JPT Online.org, energy4me.org, or any other SPE website as long as it is in a manner that does NOT imply SPE endorsement and does NOT include an SPE logo. 

• Without SPE permission, you may post or publish an abstract (summary) of any SPE-copyrighted paper as long as it is less than 300 words, or no more than 10% of the entire paper, and it does not include any figures, graphics, or questions. Proper acknowledgement of SPE and copyright year must be included as well as a link to the original paper on OnePetro using the DOI link.

• SPE copyrighted content may be used in an oral presentation, so long as the original source is mentioned.

1. SPE staff, editor, or chair receives ethical concern submission and sends to the appropriate publications staff representative. The representative may ask for clarification, if needed, from the author of the content related to the ethical concern. Ethical concerns may be presented anonymously, but identity will need to be revealed to the representative to verify that there is no conflict of interest.
    
2. The staff representative will verify that the publication in question is managed and/or published by SPE and that there is no obvious conflict of interest between the ethical concern submitter and the author(s) of the publication in question.
    
3. If the concern meets the aforementioned criteria, the representative will request a response from the original author(s) of publication. The author(s) will be given reasonable time to craft their response based on the complexity of the case.
    
4. An ethics panel made up of volunteers will be put together by the representative (or the editor-in-chief for SPE Journal concerns). The panel’s makeup is different for each publication type (see chart at the end of this document) and will consist of 2–5 members. The original ethical concern and authors' response will be sent to the ethics panel, and they will be given reasonable time to review the case based on complexity. Any volunteer invited to serve on an ethics panel should recuse themselves if they believe there is a conflict of interest.
    
5. The ethics panel will review the case and decide how to proceed. The options include:
   1. No ethical violation, no further action is needed.
   2. Non-ethical issue, ethics panel will give recommendations for how the author(s) should revise their publication. Authors are not required to revise their publication but are strongly encouraged to do so.
   3. Minor ethical violation, allow original author(s) to revise the publication based on volunteer review. If the authors refuse to make changes, their publication may be withdrawn.
   4. Major ethical violation, publication is withdrawn. The ethics panel may also recommend if the author(s) should be evaluated by the SPE Conduct Review Committee, but only if they are also an SPE member.
       
6. The ethics panel may request further clarification from either the ethical concern submitter or the original publication authors.
    
7. The final decision is communicated to the ethical concern submitter and the original publication authors. The chosen action is taken. If a major ethical violation is the outcome and the ethics panel recommends that the SPE member(s) involved have a subsequent Code of Conduct review, the Chief Executive Officer will review and decide whether to escalate the case to the SPE Conduct Review Committee.

The failure of SPE conference/symposium authors to have at least one author or designated individual participate in-person at the time of the live presentation to present and/or answer questions will result in the paper being permanently withdrawn from the SPE technical paper archive in OnePetro.

Authors will be allowed to submit abstracts to only one conference at a time. An abstract must be declined by a program committee prior to being submitted to another conference for consideration. In the event it is detected that an abstract has been submitted to more than one conference, all versions/copies of that abstract will be removed from consideration.

Any paper previously presented at an SPE conference and published in OnePetro may not be re-submitted for publication at another SPE conference. The author may present the subject matter at subsequent conferences at the invitation of the program committee, but the paper will not be included in the subsequent conference proceedings.

To best serve attendees, SPE makes its Proceedings available on the first day of the conference. To ensure that these Proceedings provide a quality version of each paper, authors are asked to review their manuscript carefully for errors and get all required company approval(s) prior to uploading a manuscript.

Serious Problems with Your Proceedings Paper after Uploading

If, for legal or other reasons, it is imperative that a paper NOT appear in the Proceedings, the author must contact the SPE Conference Program Lead immediately and provide a detailed explanation of why the paper must be withdrawn. The paper will be pulled, as requested.

Correction Requests

If an author has a correction that needs to be made to a submitted manuscript, the corresponding author should submit the correction information via the Manuscript Correction Request Form (SPE Login required).

1. A USD 125 fee will be charged for the processing of the update.
2. Please note that revisions submitted through this form will take up to 15 business days to process and update on OnePetro.
3. Please note that any corrections will only apply to the version of the manuscript on OnePetro.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) has adopted a hybrid approach to open access publication with open access and traditional access-controlled articles. This applies to both journal and conference papers. Open access articles are freely available to all readers on OnePetro.org and the author(s) retain copyright of their work. Traditional access-controlled articles will continue to be accepted without processing fees.

Starting with select meetings in 2025, authors submitting to a conference may choose to pay an article publication charge (APC) of US$600.00 for open access. SPE members receive a US$100.00 discount on the APC (US$500.00). Authors from low and lower-middle income economies (Group A and B; based on Research4Life’s classifications) will receive a 50% discount (US$300.00). This cannot be combined with the SPE member discount. Payment is required after acceptance of the abstract and must be received prior to the final manuscript submission deadline for the meeting. Open access publication is not available for previously published SPE conference papers. Open access articles will be published under a Creative Commons license term (CC-BY). In order to make clear the separation between scientific editorial decision-making and economic considerations, the option to publish an article under open access is offered to corresponding authors only after review of the abstract and acceptance of a manuscript for the conference. A payment link will be supplied with the abstract acceptance notification.

Author Responsibilities: SPE cannot advise authors on compliance with any requirements placed on them by their funder or employer regarding open access publication. In all cases, the author must verify that their chosen route to publication is in compliance.

Since copyright holders might have policies against commercial reuse, authors that wish to have their article published via the open access CC-BY license should check to be sure that any material they use in their article that was not created by them may be published under the CC-BY license. SPE cannot advise on these issues, nor undertake negotiations with rights holders on the author's behalf. Also, authors are still bound by SPE’s Publication Policies; the Creative Commons licenses are not an endorsement for duplicate publication.

SPE does not permit the submission of a manuscript which is based on same data, ideas, methods and conclusions which has either been published or is simultaneously under review by another journal. For manuscripts that are in-review, only the abstract of the paper may be submitted to a preprint server.

Manuscripts previously declined for publication by a peer-reviewed journal may be submitted to SPE Journal if the prior review process has been completed and an official decline decision has been rendered. 

Authors should only submit original work that has not been previously published in a refereed journal. Previously published explicitly does not include oral or poster presentations, conference proceedings or student theses/dissertations. 

Preliminary, high-level, or synopsized publications in SPE Magazines also do not constitute dual publication if an author submits a manuscript on the same research to SPE Journal. 

Errors introduced by authors or the publication that affect the validity of a published work can be corrected in the form of a published erratum.

Format corrections, such as replacing a low-resolution image, correcting corrupted figure labeling, and similar minor changes not involving scientific content, can be made at the discretion of SPE, without formal notification. Please send all correction requests to peer@spe.org.

All submissions to peer review must meet SPE’s paper length limit requirements.

Technical papers should be no more than 10,000 words, including the abstract, main text, tables, figure captions, and appendices (but not including the title, affiliations, acknowledgments, nomenclature, or references). In addition, a maximum of 20 figures that are sized half-page or smaller (full-page figures will be counted as two figures) will be allowed. This 20-figure maximum includes appendix figures. We encourage authors to run a word count check before submission to avoid processing delays. Papers that exceed the length limit will be returned by SPE staff with a request to shorten the manuscript before the paper will be submitted for peer review. We also encourage authors to use the Supplementary Materials template (available in Author Resources) for additional data, figures, and tables that support the main paper. Supplements submitted with the paper for review will be later published with the accepted paper.

Review Papers do not have a length limit.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) has adopted a hybrid approach to open access publication with Open Access and traditional access-controlled articles. Traditional access-controlled articles will continue to be accepted without processing fees.

As of 1 January 2022, authors submitting to SPE Journal may choose to pay an article publication charge (APC) of US$2,500.00 for Open Access. SPE members receive a US$500.00 discount on the APC (US$2000.00). Authors from low and lower-middle income economies (Group A and B; based on Research4Life’s classifications) will receive a 50% discount (US$1250.00). This cannot be combined with the SPE member discount. Payment is required after acceptance of the article for publication and must be received prior to online publication. Open Access articles will be published under a Creative Commons license term (CC-BY). In order to make clear the separation between scientific editorial decision-making and economic considerations, the option to publish an article under Open Access is offered to corresponding authors after peer-review and acceptance of an article for publication. If you would like your accepted paper to be Open Access, please contact peer@spe.org for information and payment processing.

Author Responsibilities: SPE cannot advise authors on compliance with any requirements placed on them by their funder or employer regarding open access publication. In all cases, the author must verify that their chosen route to publication is in compliance.

Since copyright holders might have policies against commercial reuse, authors that wish to have their article published via the Open Access CC-BY license should check to be sure that any material they use in their article that was not created by them may be published under the CC-BY license. SPE cannot advise on these issues, nor undertake negotiations with rights holders on the author's behalf. Also, authors are still bound by SPE’s Publication Policies; the Creative Commons licenses are not an endorsement for duplicate publication.