1. Open Access Statement

Journal of Soil and Water Conservation was founded in 1987 and flipped to a fully open-access journal under the CC BY-NC-ND license in 2022. All articles published in the journal since 2022 are open-access works, available to readers free of charge immediately and permanently upon publication. Readers may copy, distribute, and use these articles in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND license.

Articles published in the journal before its transition to full open access (i.e., those published in 2021 and earlier) are not open-access works, and their copyrights are held by the editorial department of the journal. Articles from specific years are available for free download in PDF format on the journal's official website, allowing readers to access the full text at no cost.

2. Licensing Policy

For open-access articles published in the journal (i.e., those published since 2022), permissible third-party reuse is defined by the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows users to copy and distribute the articles in any medium or format as long as the license terms below are followed:

Users must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes to the articles were made. Users may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the use. Users may not use the articles for commercial purposes. If users re-mix, transform, or build upon the articles, they may not distribute the modified articles. The full details of the license are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

3. Copyright Policy

All authors are required to sign the "Copyright Transfer Agreement" to transfer the copyright of their article to the editorial department of Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. After the article is published, its copyright will belong to the editorial department of the journal. Authors have the right to use their published articles under the following circumstances:

(1) Authors may copy, disseminate, and use their articles under the journal's license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), such as using the article for non-commercial academic seminars, communications, scholarly reports, lectures, etc.;

(2) Authors may also use their articles for any other activities that are permitted and authorized by the editorial department.

If the article is not published by the journal in the end, the "Copyright Transfer Agreement" signed by the authors will automatically become invalid.

The "Copyright Transfer Agreement" can be found in the "Download Center" of this website.