This article explores the challenges related to copyright policies in the context of science and engineering open access (OA) journals based in Korea. The English-language science and engineering OA journals published independently by Korean academic societies typically exhibit three common characteristics regarding their copyright and licensing policies. First, authors are generally required to transfer their copyrights. Second, the Creative Commons (CC) license terms are predominantly BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial), without providing authors the option to select alternative licensing terms. Third, the journals do not sufficiently protect the rights of the authors. From the analyses presented herein, it is evident that the current copyright and licensing policies of Korea’s English-language science and engineering OA journals lack a robust structure. These policies need to be revised to allow authors to retain copyright and require them to consent for the CC license terms it adopts, in order to align with the common practice among OA journals. Furthermore, to better protect authors’ rights, it would be beneficial to permit authors to choose the specific terms of the CC license for their articles.
At the end of 2022, the appearance of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with amazing writing ability, caused a great sensation in academia. The chatbot turned out to be very capable, but also capable of deception, and the news broke that several researchers had listed the chatbot (including its earlier version) as co-authors of their academic papers. In response, Nature and Science expressed their position that this chatbot cannot be listed as an author in the papers they publish. Since an AI chatbot is not a human being, in the current legal system, the text automatically generated by an AI chatbot cannot be a copyrighted work; thus, an AI chatbot cannot be an author of a copyrighted work. Current AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are much more advanced than search engines in that they produce original text, but they still remain at the level of a search engine in that they cannot take responsibility for their writing. For this reason, they also cannot be authors from the perspective of research ethics.
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Research and publication misconduct may occur in various forms, including author misrepresentation, plagiarism, and data fabrication. Research and publication ethics are essentially not legal duties, but ethical obligations. In reality, however, legal disputes arise over whether research and publication ethics have been violated. Thus, in many cases, misconduct in research and publication is determined in the courts. This article presents noteworthy legal cases in Korea regarding research and publication ethics to help editors and authors prevent ethical misconduct. Legal cases from 2009 to 2020 were collected from the database of the Supreme Court of Korea in December 2020. These court cases represent three case types: 1) civil cases, such as affirmation of nullity of dismissal and damages; 2) criminal cases, such as fraud, interference with business, and violations of copyright law; and 3) administrative cases related to disciplinary measures against professors affiliated with a university. These cases show that although research and publication ethics are ethical norms that are autonomously established by the relevant academic societies, they become a criterion for case resolution in legal disputes where research and publication misconduct is at issue.
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