Policies
Section 1 Peer Review
1. Review System: The review process of this journal includes three stages: preliminary review, external review, and final review. The external review is conducted double-anonymously by at least two peer experts. Authors are required to revise the manuscript according to the review comments and then return it for further review. The editor-in-chief will conduct a final review to determine whether the manuscript will be accepted.
2. Requirement: During the review process, authors are not allowed to submit the manuscript to another journal. If authors fail to return the revised manuscript within the specified time, the submission could be rejected by the editorial office. Authors should be responsible for their own writing. The editorial office has right to make technical and textual modification to the manuscript. Meaningful content modification can also be made after confirming with the authors.
3. Special Issues and Columns: The review process for special issues, special columns or invited submission follows the same procedure as the regular issues, including identical review and editorial processes, with the editor-in-chief making the final acceptance decision. The editor-in-chief is responsible for all content, including special issues, columns and invited submissions. For special issues, authoritative experts in the field may be invited to serve as guest editors, overseeing theme proposal, soliciting manuscript, organizing peer review, and addressing any publication issues under the editor-in-chief's supervision to ensure fairness in the review process.
4. Submissions by EBMs/Editors/Guest Editors: Submissions by Editorial Board Members/Editors/Guest Editors must adhere to the journal's review and editorial procedures, ensuring independence from the involved individuals and their research groups. They cannot participate in reviews of manuscripts with whose authors they have conflicts of interest.
5. Correction and Retraction: After publishing, if there appears to be an unintended scientific mistake in the article which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusion, the editorial office will publish corrections in the journal as soon as possible, and detailing the changes made to the original article. If severe scientific errors are found in published articles, or the article is suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, the editorial office will issue a statement to inform readers of the risks, initiate an investigation and announce the final result, or even retract article with a retraction statement if necessary.
Section 2 Copyright and Open Access Policy
1. Open Access：Electric Power Technology and Environmental Protection flipped to an open access journal in 2023. Since the first issue of 2023, once published, all articles are immediately and permanently available for readers to read and download free of charge. Articles published before 2023 are not open access, but some of those articles can be downloaded on this website for free.
2. Archive：All journal articles published since 2023 are archived on this website. For articles published before 2023, the soft and hard copies are archived in the editorial office. In order to ensure data security, all information has also been backed up in the editorial office. Hard and soft copies of each issue of the journal are kept in the editorial office for archiving. In addition, other relevant materials are also kept by the editorial office, such as supplementary information and forms provided by the authors.
3. OA Licensing: Electric Power Technology and Environmental Protection is an open access journal and adopts the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. This allows third-party users to copy and distribute the open access papers of the journal in any medium or format. When copying and distributing papers from the journal, third-party users must provide appropriate attribution, include a link to the license, and indicate whether any modifications have been made to the original paper. Attribution should be done in a reasonable manner, but should not imply endorsement by the journal. The papers from the journal cannot be used for commercial purposes. If the papers are remixed, transformed, or built upon, the modified material cannot be distributed. The full details of the license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
4. Copyright Transfer: The first author signs the Copyright Grant Agreement on behalf of all authors and guarantees the consent of all authors is obtained. The copyright owners (authors) of the paper agree to publish the paper in Electric Power Technology and Environmental Protection, and agree to grant the rights to use the paper's copyright to the Editorial Office of Electric Power Technology and Environmental Protection, including but not limited to digital reproduction right, distribution right, translation right, compilation right and information network dissemination right (WeChat official account, journal official website, databases and other information platforms) worldwide. Authors retain full copyright of the paper. The authorization is non-exclusive and the term is the same to the copyright protection period.
Section 3 Ethical Policies
1. Ethics for Reviewers and Editors: Reviewers and editors should adhere to the following standards in their work:
(1) Reviewers and editors must process manuscripts fairly and impartially. The selection criteria should be only based on quality, innovation, scientificity, practicality, and the requirement of the publishing scope.
(2) Reviewers and editors should keep confidential the manuscript content, author information and review comment.
(3) Reviewers and editors should respect the research achievements of authors and should not disclose or use data of unpublished articles without authorization.
(4) If any academic misconduct is found in the manuscript, reviewers and editors shall handle the case impartially.
(5) If there is a conflict of interest, reviewers and editors should report it to the editorial office and avoiding handling the manuscript.
2. Ethics for Authors: Authors should follow the following standards in their work:
(1) No Plagiarism: Authors should ensure the originality and integrity of the article, without any plagiarism, forgery, tampering and fraud, and that the article has not been published on other journals before. Once any academic misconduct is verified, the journal will immediately reject the manuscript. Further penalty may be imposed according to relevant regulations.
(2) Authorship: Those who are named as authors should directly participate in the research and writing work. They should be responsible for the manuscript. “Gift author” is strictly prohibited. The signature, order of authors, institutes and the corresponding authors shall be collectively determined before submission and shall not be changed thereafter. The authors should specify their contribution in the Authors Statement Form and submit it along with the manuscript.
(3) Conflicts of Interest: All authors must disclose all potential conflicts of interest, i.e., when the financing/ personal status/ affiliation of the authors (or the authors' organization/ employer) may affect the authors' decision, work or manuscript. When a product is involved, the author should also disclose whether there is a conflict of interest against competitive products. Authors should also submit the Authors Statement Form along with the manuscript to declare any conflicts of interest. Even if there are no actual conflicts of interest. They should also declare the absence of such conflicts.
3. Handling of Academic Misconduct: The journal’s editorial board will discuss and determine whether there is an academic misconduct and what the penalty is. Should forgery of data, multiple submission or plagiarism be found, the manuscript will be rejected immediately and the journal will not accept submission from the authors involved in two years. An announcement shall be published and the institutes of the authors shall be notified. All consequences shall be borne by authors. For other types of academic misconduct, once verified, the case will be handled according to national standards and international guidelines, depending on the specific circumstances.