Policies

This page states, in English, the editorial and publishing policies of Nuclear Strategy and Policy. The policies are set by regulation. The regulations are published in full, in Korean, and are open to anyone without registration or payment. Each statement below links to the Korean text that governs it. Where the English statement and the Korean text differ, the Korean text prevails.

규정 전문 / Regulations in full (Korean) · 한국어 / Korean

1. Peer Review Policy

Every manuscript submitted to Review on Nuclear Energy Strategy and Policy is peer reviewed. Review is single-blind: reviewers are told who the authors are, and authors are never told who the reviewers are. The names of reviewers are not disclosed to authors, to readers or in any published record.

Item	Policy
Screening	The editorial secretary checks each submission against six intake criteria and reports to the Editor-in-Chief, who decides whether to send the manuscript out for review. Where a manuscript is not sent out, the author is told why.
Reviewers	Two reviewers are appointed for each manuscript. A reviewer holds a doctoral degree in the relevant field, or has a research record of comparable standing. Editorial Board members recommend reviewers; where delay must be avoided, the Editor-in-Chief may appoint a reviewer directly and records the reason for doing so.
Reviewer suggestions	The journal does not accept reviewers suggested by authors. Reviewers are recommended by Editorial Board members and appointed by the Editor-in-Chief. An author may, however, ask that a named person be excluded from the review, giving reasons; the Editor-in-Chief decides on the request, and the request is not disclosed to that person.
Time limits	A reviewer returns a first review within 20 days of being appointed, and a second review (after a Revise and Resubmit decision) within 10 days. A reviewer may ask once for an extension of up to 10 days. Where a review is not returned, the Editor-in-Chief may replace the reviewer, and the time limit starts again for the replacement.
Reviewer report	A reviewer scores each assessment item on the prescribed form and gives reasons. Where a reviewer decides Accept with Revisions, Revise and Resubmit or Reject, the reviewer must state the specific changes required.
Decision	The Editor-in-Chief issues the decision within 10 days of the day on which all reviewer reports have been received, and sends the author the full reviewer reports with identifying information removed.
Revised manuscript	The author submits the revised manuscript, together with a written response to each point raised, within 14 days of the decision.
Publication of reviews	Reviewer reports are not published alongside articles. They are sent to the author with identifying information removed, and are retained for at least five years.

Decisions

Decision	Korean	Effect
Accept	게재 가능	The manuscript is published as submitted.
Accept with Revisions	수정 후 게재	The author revises the manuscript and the Editor-in-Chief confirms that the revisions have been made. The manuscript is not sent out for review again.
Revise and Resubmit	수정 후 재심	The author revises the manuscript and it is sent for a second round of review, which takes 10 days.
Reject	게재 불가	The manuscript is not published. The decision and the anonymised reviewer reports are sent to the author.

Where the two reviewers disagree. If the two decisions differ by two or more grades on the four-grade scale above, the Editor-in-Chief may appoint a third reviewer, and the final decision is then made by the Editor-in-Chief on the basis of all three reports. Where a third reviewer is not appointed, the reason must be recorded on the final decision form.

Appeals

An author may appeal a decision in writing to the Editorial Board within 15 days of being notified of it, stating the grounds and the evidence on the prescribed form. The Editorial Board considers the appeal and notifies the author of the outcome within 30 days of receiving it. Where the Editorial Board finds the appeal well founded, it may send the manuscript to a third reviewer who was not involved in the original review, and decides in the light of that review. The Editor-in-Chief who made the original decision takes no part in deciding the appeal; another Editorial Board member chairs it, in an order fixed in advance. While an appeal is pending, the deadline for submitting a revised manuscript does not run.

Grounds for recusal

A person who falls within any of the following is excluded from reviewing the manuscript. A reviewer who is invited to review declares any such ground before the manuscript is released to them, and must withdraw if a ground arises later.

Ground	Scope
Same institution	The reviewer belongs to the same institution as an author. Departments and affiliated research institutes within one university are not treated as separate institutions.
Recent joint work	The reviewer has carried out joint research with an author, or has co-authored a publication with an author, within the past three years.
Supervisory relationship	The reviewer has been, or is, an academic supervisor of an author, or the reverse.
Kinship	The reviewer is a relative of an author within the fourth degree of kinship.

Where an Editorial Board member is an author, that member is excluded from every stage of the review of that manuscript and has no access to it in the submission system. Where the Editor-in-Chief is an author, another Editorial Board member, designated in advance, takes charge of the review and exercises the powers that the regulations give to the Editor-in-Chief. Which member stood down, on what ground, and who acted instead, is recorded and reported to the regular meeting of the Editorial Board.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 심사 규정 (Review Regulations), Articles 2 to 6-2 · 편집위원회 규정 (Editorial Board Regulations), Article 5

2. Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Review on Nuclear Energy Strategy and Policy expects authors, reviewers and editors to observe the standards set out in its Research Ethics Regulations. Those regulations define research misconduct, provide for a similarity check on every submission, protect whistleblowers, fix the time limits within which an allegation must be handled, and set out the sanctions that may follow a finding of misconduct. The Research Ethics Committee, which is separate from the Editorial Board and takes no part in peer review, handles allegations.

What counts as research misconduct

Conduct	Definition
Fabrication	Creating or reporting research data, materials or results that do not exist.
Falsification	Manipulating research materials, equipment or processes, or arbitrarily altering or deleting research data, so that the research record is distorted.
Plagiarism	Using another person’s original ideas or work without proper attribution, including verbatim use, paraphrase without citation, use of another’s ideas without citation, and translation without citation.
Improper authorship	Granting authorship to a person who did not contribute, or withholding authorship from a person who did contribute, including publishing a supervised student’s thesis under the supervisor’s name alone.
Redundant publication	Publishing work identical or substantially similar to the author’s own earlier work without citing it. The journal also treats this as misconduct where the author gained no benefit from it.
Concurrent submission	Submitting to this journal a manuscript that is under review at another journal, or submitting to another journal a manuscript that is under review here.
False disclosure	Falsely declaring, or deliberately omitting, a conflict of interest or the use of generative artificial intelligence.
Obstruction	Deliberately obstructing an investigation into research misconduct, or harming a whistleblower.

Similarity check

Every submission is checked for similarity, and the threshold is 20 per cent. The Editorial Board runs the check on every manuscript using the similarity check service of the Korea Citation Index (KCI), and the author must also submit the certificate of a check they have run themselves. Quoted passages, sentences carrying a citation, the table of contents and the reference list are excluded from the calculation. A manuscript whose similarity exceeds 20 per cent is not sent out for review; the author is told why and may revise and submit again. The Editor-in-Chief may none the less send such a manuscript out for review after reading the original sources, where quotation and attribution are found to be proper, and must record the reason for doing so. An author may ask for that assessment to be reconsidered within 15 days. The settings used and the certificate are kept on file for each manuscript.

Allegations: how they are handled

Stage	Time limit	What happens
Report	Any time	Anyone may report suspected misconduct, orally, in writing, by telephone or by electronic mail. Anonymous reports are accepted, but an investigation can be opened only where the report identifies the article and is accompanied by evidence of the specific conduct alleged, in writing or by electronic mail.
Decision to investigate	Within 30 days	The Research Ethics Committee decides within 30 days of receiving the report whether to open an investigation. Where it decides not to, it tells the person who reported the matter why.
Investigation	Within 6 months	An investigation panel is formed. Every author is sent written questions and given an opportunity to answer. The person who reported the matter and the person under investigation may both make submissions. A finding is made within six months of the day the investigation was opened.
Appeal	After the finding	A person against whom a finding is made may appeal, and the Committee reconsiders the matter.
Sanction	After the appeal period	Sanctions are imposed once the appeal period has passed or the appeal has been decided. Where there is an urgent need to prevent harm from spreading, the Committee may resolve to impose a sanction sooner.
Records	At least 5 years	Every record from receipt of the report to the disposal of any appeal is kept for at least five years, on paper or electronically. The investigation report and the names of the panel may be published after the finding, except where publication would expose a panel member, a witness or a third party to detriment.

Protection of whistleblowers

The identity of a person who reports suspected misconduct is not disclosed in any circumstances. Identifying information is held separately from the case file, and only the Chair of the Research Ethics Committee has access to it: not the other members of the Committee, not the Editor-in-Chief, not the editorial secretary. No detriment of any kind follows from having made a report, and that holds even where the investigation finds no misconduct. This protection does not extend to a report made in bad faith, without any ground for believing that misconduct occurred.

Sanctions

Sanction	Effect
Notification and caution	All authors of the article are notified of the finding.
Retraction	A published article is retracted. The full text is not deleted; a retraction notice is attached to it.
Cancellation of work in progress	Manuscripts by the author that are under review or awaiting publication are cancelled.
Submission ban	The author may be barred from submitting to the journal for up to ten years. The Editorial Board keeps a record of persons under a ban and checks it when a manuscript is received.
Notification of employers and funders	The Editorial Board may notify the author’s institution and the funder of the research. Where the misconduct is confirmed and serious, it must do so.

In choosing a sanction the Editorial Board considers the nature and gravity of the conduct, whether it was intentional or grossly negligent, its effect on the journal and on third parties, and whether the person disclosed it voluntarily.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 연구윤리 규정 (Research Ethics Regulations), Articles 3-2 to 10-3 · 심사 규정 (Review Regulations), Article 2-3

3. Open Access and Copyright

Every article is free to read from the day it is published. No registration, no subscription and no payment of any kind is required to read, download or print the full text. Full texts are published on the journal website and through the Korea Citation Index (KCI).

Item	Policy
Copyright	The economic rights in an article published in the journal are assigned to the Nuclear Future Technology Policy Research Institute, Seoul National University. Moral rights remain with the authors.
Rights retained by authors	An author keeps the right to use their own article for teaching and research, and to deposit it in the repository of the institution to which they belong, provided the original publication is cited.
Signature of all authors	A copyright assignment form is submitted with the manuscript, signed by every author. A form signed by the corresponding author alone is not accepted. Where an author genuinely cannot sign, the corresponding author may sign on their behalf on producing written authority, including by electronic mail, which the Editorial Board keeps. Signature may instead be given electronically in the submission system.
Reuse by third parties	Every published article may be copied, distributed, transmitted, translated and adapted by anyone for non-commercial purposes under the licence below, provided the authors and the source are credited. Commercial use, and any use outside the licence, is settled with the Director of the Institute; every such permission is recorded and the authors are informed.
Licence	CC BY-NC 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International). The licence is stated on each article page and on the first page of each article PDF. Articles published before the licence was adopted carry it as well, unless the authors objected within 30 days of being notified (Supplementary Provision of September 2026, Article 2(3)). Status: adopted by the Editorial Board on 7 September 2026 as a proposed amendment; in force from the date of resolution.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 발행 및 투고 규정 (Publication and Submission Regulations), Article 13

4. Article Processing Charges

No fees. The journal charges authors nothing, at any stage, under any heading. There is no submission fee, no review fee, no article processing charge and no page or colour charge. Reviewers are paid an honorarium, and the journal, not the author, bears that cost. Readers pay nothing either.

Where the research reported in an article was funded, the article must state the fact of that funding. That is a disclosure requirement, not a charge.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 발행 및 투고 규정 (Publication and Submission Regulations), Article 14 · 심사 규정 (Review Regulations), Article 7-2

5. Conflict of Interest

Who	What must be declared, and what follows
Authors	An author declares, on submission and again in the Research Ethics and Conflict of Interest Statement in the manuscript itself, any research funding, advisory role, consultancy or other interest that could bear on how the results are interpreted. Where there is nothing to declare, the manuscript must say so. A declaration that is false, or deliberately omitted, is treated as research misconduct. Where a minor or a family member is a co-author, that fact and each person’s contribution must be declared, and the Editorial Board verifies the contribution.
Reviewers	A reviewer declares any ground for recusal when the invitation to review is issued, before the manuscript is released to them, and withdraws if a ground arises later. The grounds are those set out under Peer Review Policy above: same institution, joint work or co-authorship within three years, supervisory relationship, kinship within the fourth degree.
Editors	An Editorial Board member who is an author of a manuscript is excluded from every stage of its handling and cannot open it in the submission system. Where the Editor-in-Chief is an author, a member designated in advance takes charge instead. A member of the Research Ethics Committee who is the person reporting, or the person reported, in a case takes no part in deliberating or voting on it.

The journal does not rely on good intentions here. Who stood down, on what ground, and who acted in their place is recorded in every case and reported to the regular meeting of the Editorial Board, so that the record, and not an assurance, is what shows the process was fair.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 연구윤리 규정 (Research Ethics Regulations), Articles 5-2 and 5-3 · 심사 규정 (Review Regulations), Articles 3-2 to 3-4 · 편집위원회 규정 (Editorial Board Regulations), Article 5

6. Use of Generative AI

Artificial intelligence cannot be an author. Authorship carries responsibility for the content, and a tool cannot bear it. Responsibility for everything in a manuscript rests with the human authors, whatever tools were used.

Rule	Detail
Disclosure	An author who has used a generative AI or AI-based tool in preparing the manuscript must state, in the Research Ethics and Conflict of Interest Statement in the manuscript: the name and version of the tool, the organisation that provides it, when or over roughly what period it was used, and what it was used for. The submitted research ethics undertaking also records whether generative AI was used, including where it was not.
Editorial help	Whether purely instrumental use (spelling correction, translation, format conversion of text the author wrote) must be disclosed is settled by the Editorial Board. Where AI generated any new sentence, table, figure or code, that must be disclosed however small the amount.
Prohibited uses	Generating or altering survey, experimental, observational or simulation data; presenting AI-generated figures as if they were real statistics; replacing the results of quantitative, simulation, design or safety analysis with AI-generated numbers; taking conclusions or policy recommendations wholesale from AI output; using AI-generated references or quotations without verifying that they exist and are accurate; and entering confidential material, trade secrets or personal data into an external AI service. Any of these is treated as research misconduct.
Reviewers	A reviewer must not upload an unpublished manuscript, in whole or in substantial part, to an external generative AI service in order to summarise or assess it or to draft a review. A reviewer may use an AI-based tool only where the content of the manuscript is not transmitted outside the tool or used to train it. A reviewer may use AI for general background, but must reach the core judgements of the review, on methodology, reliability of data, soundness of policy recommendations and evaluation of engineering safety, personally. A reviewer confirms compliance when submitting the review.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 인공지능활용 규정 (Regulations on the Use of Artificial Intelligence), Articles 4 to 10 · 연구윤리 규정 (Research Ethics Regulations), Articles 3-2 and 5-4

7. Corrections, Retractions and Expressions of Concern

A published full text is never deleted. Where an article is retracted, the text stays where it is and a retraction notice is attached to it. Deleting the file would make it impossible for anyone who had already cited the article to establish what they had read.

Situation	What the journal does
Retraction requested by the authors	All authors together may ask the Editor-in-Chief to retract a published article, stating their reasons. The Editorial Board resolves whether to accept the request, and the outcome and reasons are notified to the authors and recorded. Where the request touches on suspected research misconduct, the research ethics procedure takes precedence.
Retraction after a finding of misconduct	The Editorial Board publishes the fact of the retraction, the reason and the date of the decision on the journal website, and carries a retraction notice in the next issue. The notice gives the title, the authors, the issue and pages, and the reason. It does not identify the person who reported the matter, and does not disclose private information learnt during the investigation.
Marking the record	The retraction is registered with the Korea Citation Index and any other database in which the full text appears, and the full text there is marked as retracted. The full text itself is not removed.
Third-party claims	Where a third party claims that a published article infringes copyright or another right, the same procedure applies. Any legal dispute is handled in consultation with the Institute.
Corrections	Errors that do not go to the findings are corrected by a correction notice, which is recorded against the article. The published version is not silently altered.
Expressions of concern	The regulations do not at present provide a separate expression of concern. Where a serious question arises about a published article but the investigation is not complete, the journal handles it under the research ethics procedure and publishes the outcome once the finding is made. The Editorial Board is considering whether to add an express provision.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 발행 및 투고 규정 (Publication and Submission Regulations), Article 11-2 · 연구윤리 규정 (Research Ethics Regulations), Article 9

8. Archiving and Preservation

Where	What is held there
Journal website	The table of contents of every issue published since 2023 and the full text of every article are available on the journal and publisher websites, free of charge and without registration, from the date of publication.
Korea Citation Index (KCI)	The journal is registered with the Korea Citation Index, operated by the National Research Foundation of Korea. For each published article the journal registers the date of submission, the date of review and the date of acceptance, and makes the full text openly available.
Print	A printed issue is produced and distributed twice a year. Readers may ask to receive the PDF by electronic mail or the printed issue by post; neither is necessary in order to read the articles.

What the journal does not yet have. The journal is a KCI candidate journal (등재후보지) and has not yet been granted accredited (등재) status; an application is in preparation. It does not assign DOIs to articles. It does not currently take part in an external long-term digital preservation scheme such as CLOCKSS, LOCKSS or Portico. It is not indexed in Scopus, Web of Science or DOAJ. These are stated here rather than left to be inferred.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 발행 및 투고 규정 (Publication and Submission Regulations), Article 13 · 심사 규정 (Review Regulations), Articles 2-2 and 7-3

9. COPE Core Practices

The policies of Review on Nuclear Energy Strategy and Policy are aligned with the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The table below sets out, for each Core Practice, the provision of the journal’s regulations that gives effect to it.

Core Practice	How the journal gives effect to it
Allegations of misconduct	Anyone may report suspected misconduct. The Research Ethics Committee decides within 30 days whether to investigate and reaches a finding within 6 months, with an appeal available to the person investigated.
Authorship and contributorship	Improper authorship is defined as research misconduct. Adding, removing or reordering authors requires the consent of every author and a written reason. Where a minor or a family member is a co-author, the contribution of each must be declared and is verified.
Complaints and appeals	An author may appeal a review decision within 15 days, and it is decided within 30 days by people other than the person who made the original decision.
Conflicts of interest	Authors declare interests on submission and in the article. Reviewers and editors are recused on defined grounds, and each recusal is recorded and reported.
Data and reproducibility	Fabrication and falsification of data are defined as misconduct, as is presenting AI-generated numbers as real data. The journal does not at present operate a data availability policy requiring deposit of underlying data.
Ethical oversight	A Research Ethics Committee separate from the Editorial Board handles allegations, protects whistleblowers and decides sanctions.
Intellectual property	Plagiarism is defined and every submission is checked for similarity against a 20 per cent threshold. Copyright assignment requires the signature of every author, and reuse terms are published.
Journal management	The Editorial Board has at least five members, a majority of whom must be from outside the publishing institute, meets at least twice a year and keeps minutes. Its regulations are published in full together with the record of amendments.
Peer review processes	The method, the number of reviewers, the time limits, the four decisions, the treatment of divergent reviews and the appeal route are all fixed by published regulation rather than by practice.
Post-publication discussions and corrections	Retraction and correction are provided for, notices are published on the website and in the next issue and registered with KCI, and the full text is never deleted.

This is a statement of alignment with the COPE Core Practices. The journal does not claim membership of COPE, and nothing on this page should be read as a claim of membership.

Governing text (Korean, full text, open to all): 규정 5종 전문 (all five regulations, Korean)

Author Guidelines About the Journal 규정 전문 (Korean)한국어 / Korean