The world of academic publications is moving toward open access and the creation of a system that allows free online access to academic research results for everyone is underway. Open access requires that the materials are available on the Internet at no charge and that a license is expressly in place for use and reuse.

To heighten the international dissemination of the institute’s journals Tetsu-to-Hagané and ISIJ International (including predecessor journals) as open access journals, we will grant usage licenses (Creative Commons licenses), or more specifically CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) licenses (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.ja) for all articles. We are also considering secondary usage in the future to further promote the use of academic research results.

For the usage mentioned above, in the articles of the following academic publications, we are asking authors to transfer copyrights to the institute for articles predating July, 1980, for which we do not hold the copyright. Therefore, we kindly request your consent to the copyright transfer.

•  The Japanese language journal Tetsu-to-Hagané;

•  The foreign journals Transactions of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan,Tetsu-to-Hagané
      Overseas, and Tetsu-to-Hagané Abstracts.

(The Iron and Steel Institute of Japan requested the authors’ consent for the use of their copyrights to the institute for articles in the academic publications above that predate July, 1980. Although we have already obtained consent from the author, in order to achieve the above purpose, not only the license to use the copyright but also the transfer of the copyright itself to the institute is required.)

If you do not consent to the copyright transfer, we ask that you contact the institute’s office by March 31, 2021 (regarding the article in question, please inform us of the following by e-mail: (1) your name, (2) the title of the article, and (3) the volume, number, and pages of its publication). We will refrain from granting a CC BY-NC-ND license and secondary use to these articles.

If you do not respond, the institute will determine that you have consented to the copyright transfer. If you later object even though you have not responded, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We should request authors individually to follow this procedure. However, we kindly ask for your understanding of our circumstances and your approval of the above procedure.

For applications and inquiries, please contact us at the address below: