Abstract:

Notice to contributors is the important legal determination of rights and obligations between authors and journals.Therefore, the content of notices to contributors plays a very important role to strike the interest balance between authors and journals.The paper investigated 100 notices to contributors of CSSCI Journal and found that email submission is the most popular contributor means; feedback period of journals is generally much longer than statutory 30 days;47 notices are opposed to the behavior that one paper submitted to several journals at the same time; 53 notices concerns to whether they would pay authors royalties;89 notices didn’t involve the issue about publication fee; 42 notices didn’t involve the right to modify;41 notices didn’t involve the right to disseminate on internet;only few of journals signed copyright transfer contract with the authors.Those reflect there are also improvements for notice to contributors in China. Based on above, some advices focused on those issues are put forward.

Key words: Notice to contributors, 　Copyright, 　CSSCI journals, 　Empirical research