Open Access
In April 2024, the Journal of South China Agricultural University officially transitioned to an open-access journal under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Since then, all articles are immediately and permanently available for free reading and downloading on the journal's website upon publication. Open access extends retroactively to 1959, meaning all articles published since the journal's inception in 1959 are freely accessible and downloadable on the website, also under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which defines user rights.

Licensing Policy

This journal uses the "CC BY-NC: Attribution (BY)-Non-Commercial Use (NC)" agreement in the Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to reproduce, distribute, exhibit, compile, and disseminate articles published in this journal, but must retain the original author's signature and only for non-commercial purposes. Authors who submit papers to this journal are deemed to agree to transfer the copyright of the paper to the Journal of South China Agricultural University, including reproduction rights, distribution rights, dissemination rights, translation rights, compilation rights, etc., after the paper is accepted. After the paper is published, the author has the authorship of the article, and the author can still use and share the article under the license of the intellectual property agreement (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Archiving Methods

The electronic versions of each issue published since 1959 are archived on the journal's official website, with backups of both digital and print editions maintained by the editorial office. All print editions and materials related to the "three-round peer review and proofreading" process are archived at the South China Agricultural University Archives. In addition to self-archiving on the journal's website, the full-text electronic data of the journal are also stored in databases such as CNKI and Wanfang Data.