1. Open Access Statement

Bulletin of Geological Science and Technology flipped to an open-access journal under the CC BY-NC-ND license in 2021. All articles published in the journal since 2021 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 2020 and earlier) are not open-access works, and their copyrights are held by the editorial department of the journal. Articles from specific years (please see the Archive) are available for free download in PDF format via the journal's 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 2021), permitted third-party reuse of the articles is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows all users to copy and distribute the articles in any medium or format. The journal cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms below are followed:

Users must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes 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 remix, 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

Once manuscripts are accepted, authors will be required to sign the “Copyright Transfer Agreement & Declaration of Authors” to transfer the copyright of their articles to the journal's publisher (i.e., the editorial department of Bulletin of Geological Science and Technology), and the copyright will belong to the editorial department of the journal.

However, authors have right to use their articles under the following circumstances:

(1) Reproducing, disseminating, and using their articles freely in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License, such as non-commercial academic seminars, communication, academic reports, and lectures.

(2) Using the articles in other activities permitted and authorized by the editorial department.

If an article is not published by the journal at the end, the “Copyright Transfer Agreement & Declaration of Authors” shall be invalid automatically.

4. Digital Archive & Online Accessibility

In addition to archiving on the journal's official website, the full text of the journal's articles is also stored in the databases of CNKI, Wanfang Data, etc. Readers can access the above-mentioned databases and platforms to obtain the articles published by the journal.

It is allowed for authors to deposit all versions of their articles in an institutional or other repository of the authors' choice. However, it is necessary to indicate the articles' publishing information in the metadata in the institutional or other repository and use that as a recommended way of citation.