For authors

Interested in submitting to a journal? We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for your target journal’s Section Policies, Ethics and Publishing Policies as well as the Author Guidelines. Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting a manuscript or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process.

The Editorial Office strongly advises authors to carefully read the definition of authorship and contributors given by ICMJE and follow the Authorship Policy of each journal before submitting their manuscripts, and only those who have made significant contributions to the paper should be listed as authors, e.g., those who drafted the article, designed the experiments, analyzed the data, were responsible for the approval of the final version, and had the responsibility of explaining the issues to the editors/reviewers. Some contributors who are non-authors are recommended to be acknowledged in the Acknowledgments section. Please refer to the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) for descriptions of contributor roles. A corresponding author should be marked with “*”, and the maximum of corresponding authors is two. A corresponding author serves as a representative of the authors and is responsible for contacting editors and reviewers, e.g., submitting manuscripts, responding to reviews, accepting queries, proofreading galleys, making corrections, etc. Any change in authorship requires the approval of all authors (including those that have been added and removed). The publisher will deal with any changes or dispute over authorship following the COPE flowcharts of authorship and contributorship.

While adopting the new layout style (the timing of the adoption of the new layout style varies for each journal), the publisher requires authors of original research articles to list the author contributions in the final PDF if there is more than one author; detailed descriptions of author contributions in other types of articles are not specifically required.

Authors should understand clearly the Article Processing Charge (APC) of each journal, and the publisher receives waiver and discount applications case by case.

APACSCI journals are open access, which means all readers could get access to the publications and download them freely. Authors contributing to APACSCI journals retain the copyright. All works are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) by default. Any citations should include correct original source information.

All submissions except Editorials, will suffer a rigorous double anonymous review process. Any potential conflicts of interest will be avoided, and editors, reviewers, and authors should undertake that there is no conflict of interest in this work. Editors-in-Chief of each journal oversee the whole peer-review process, and Editorial Office will follow COPE’s flowcharts about peer review processes to identify potential or suspected peer review manipulation. We welcome authors to nominate or exclude reviewers if reasonable grounds are provided. The editorial team reserves the right to respond to such requests as appropriate.

Authors can appeal the peer review results within 4 weeks after receiving the final decision (by emailing to: editorial_office@apacsci.com). The Editorial Academic Board will set up a special panel to re-examine the peer review process and the review comments. Please note that the appeal must be based on the fairness of the procedure followed and cannot require another scientific review. The investigative team will thoroughly review the peer review process, including whether proper procedures were followed, whether the paper received a fair hearing, whether the reviewer had domain expertise, whether the reviewers’ comments were reasonable and enhanced the scientific research, and whether the authors made appropriate revisions in response to the comments. The Editor-in-Chief will give the final opinion on behalf of the Editorial Academic Committee and no further appeals will be accepted.

Readers should file a complaint to the Editorial Board when they discover alleged manipulation of peer review in an article, and the Editorial Team will follow the flowcharts of COPE to handle the complaint.