Policy Change from 2018

Abstract

Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere (SOLA) is going to implement new policy changes starting from 2018 in order to comply with a fully Open Access policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. This license permits users to adapt, distribute, and reproduce the articles of SOLA in any medium, even commercially, provided that the users give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the original source, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made, without obtaining permission from the Meteorological Society of Japan (MSJ). The copyright of articles will be retained by the authors. Authors will be required to sign a License to Publish form in order to give the MSJ permission to reproduce the article in SOLA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Another change is to employ Article Processing Charge (APC) in order to cover the publication cost such as copy editing, typesetting, and online procedures under the Open Access policy with the CC BY license, shifting from the current page charge. Author(s) or their institution(s) are requested to pay an APC to the MSJ with the amount of 80,000 Japanese Yen for members of the MSJ and 100,000 Japanese Yen for non-members of the MSJ (both with consumption tax if applicable). There will be a transition period for the articles that have been submitted in 2017 and will appear in early 2018; either the current page charge or the APC, a lower amount, will be asked to pay.
I believe that this policy change would further enhance the status of SOLA in the international community.