Copyright policies of science and engineering open access journals indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded or Scopus, published by Korean academic societies: a case study

This article explores the challenges related to copyright policies in the context of science and engineering open access (OA) journals based in Korea. The English-language science and engineering OA journals published independently by Korean academic societies typically exhibit three common characteristics regarding their copyright and licensing policies. First, authors are generally required to transfer their copyrights. Second, the Creative Commons (CC) license terms are predominantly BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial), without providing authors the option to select alternative licensing terms. Third, the journals do not sufficiently protect the rights of the authors. From the analyses presented herein, it is evident that the current copyright and licensing policies of Korea’s English-language science and engineering OA journals lack a robust structure. These policies need to be revised to allow authors to retain copyright and require them to consent for the CC license terms it adopts, in order to align with the common practice among OA journals. Furthermore, to better protect authors’ rights, it would be beneficial to permit authors to choose the specific terms of the CC license for their articles.