Over the past few months, the Oceanography Editorial Board has been writing and updating procedures and forms for the magazine. First and foremost, we are pleased to announce that Oceanography is now using the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license, making Oceanography truly open access. The CC BY 4.0 license permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction of materials in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Instead of signing over copyrights to The Oceanography Society as in the past, with the new Oceanography “license to publish,” authors retain the rights to their articles (see Author Guidelines at https://tos.org/oceanography/guidelines/). Authors will be asked to sign and submit the new form(s) at the same time as they submit articles to Oceanography. The terms of the CC BY 4.0 license will apply to all past articles published in Oceanography.

Also on our Author Guidelines page, earlier this year we posted the TOS Policy on Publication (https://tos.org/pdfs/TOS_Publications_Policy_Approved 12.13.18.pdf). These pages are a subset of TOS’s full “Policy on Professional Integrity, Ethics, Conduct, and Implementation Guidelines,” available at https://tos.org/policies/. The Publications Policy reviews the ethical obligations of editors, authors, reviewers, and the TOS Council and staff with regard to Oceanography and other TOS publications. We urge you to review these policies, even if you are familiar with publishing in academic journals.

To demystify the process for getting special issues on the publication schedule, in May we posted clearer guidance to the Oceanography website (https://tos.org/oceanography/special-issues/). While we still welcome—and indeed encourage—informal suggestions for special issue topics, we describe a process that requires submitting a short proposal that includes background information on the topic as well as the subject matter of potential individual articles.

We would like to hear from you about what we can do to continue to improve information delivery on the Oceanography website. We are particularly interested in improving the individual article pages. Please send your ideas to me at [email protected].

Thanks, and have a great summer!

– Ellen S. Kappel, Editor

Kappel, E.S. 2019. Open access and more. Oceanography 32(2):5, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2019.202.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.