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.

The following journals are subject to the above purposes.

•  The Japanese language journal Tetsu-to-Hagané;

•  The foreign journals ISIJ International, 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 has requested the author to transfer the copyright of articles published before July 1980 in the above-mentioned journals to the institute. Please refer to ISIJ International Vol. 60, No. 7 and the website of the institute.