Section 1 Ethics

1.    For Authors

Authors are obliged to indicate that the submitted article is an original research work (except for review articles) and does not contain any forged, deceptive, and plagiarized content. The submitted article does not involve confidential issues, infringement related to intellectual property rights, multiple submission, or redundant publication. Authors shall promise that they will not resubmit the article to another journal unless it is rejected by this journal. Proper credit shall be given to references cited in text and listed in the reference section in an appropriate format. Institutes, projects, and individuals that provide any contribution to the article shall be acknowledged. Comments from reviewers and editors should be respected.

An author should be a person who participates in topic selection, study design, data analysis, and manuscript drafting. The order of authors shall be determined before submission and shall not be changed thereafter. The change of order could be made only if a consent letter from all authors is provided. Other contributors for the manuscript should be listed in acknowledgement. “Gift author” is strictly prohibited. Manipulation of authorship is academic misconduct and will damage the reliability of the article. Authors must obtain authorization and consent from all co-authors and submit the "Authors Contribution Statement Form" (available for download in the relevant section) before submitting a manuscript.

All authors are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. A potential conflict of interest exists when the financial, personal, or institutional relationships of the authors (or their institutions/employers) could influence their decisions, research, or manuscript. If the manuscript mentions specific products, the authors should also disclose any competing interests related to competing products. If there are no conflicts of interest, a declaration of "no conflict of interest" must still be made. Authors must also submit the Statement of Competing Interests (available for download in the relevant section) when submitting their manuscript.

Plagiarism refers to the deliberate use of others' works without consent of the original authors, or without proper citation or acknowledgement. Plagiarism includes direct duplicating or rewriting of others' works, which may involve data, words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, and concepts. Plagiarism in any form is strictly prohibited by the journal. Research misconduct refers to the fabrication or falsification of data or conclusions that are not based on actual experiments or studies. Under no circumstances should researchers engage in research misconduct.

2.    For Reviewers

Reviewers shall guarantee that they review the manuscripts accurately, objectively, and fairly on the basis of scientific quality. They are expected to apply their professional expertise to assess the manuscript’s originality, scientific merit, and practical value. This includes a fair evaluation of the appropriateness of research methods, soundness of experimental design, accuracy of results and conclusions, and potential issues such as data confidentiality. Reviewers should provide constructive and detailed comments to help editors make informed publication decisions and to assist authors in improving their manuscripts.

Reviewers should respect the research achievements of authors and avoid reviewing manuscripts with competing interests. The review will only be based on academic standards instead of personal attributes or biases. The selection of manuscripts shall not be affected by authors’ race, gender, religion, belief, social status, qualifications, and authority. The review result should be clearly stated with sufficient arguments and facts.

Reviewers shall keep confidential the content of the manuscripts strictly, and shall not release or discuss the manuscripts with others, nor use or publish the data, opinions, and conclusions of the manuscripts. All review comments and information must be kept confidential and not used for personal purposes. Reviewers should avoid processing manuscripts for which they have competing interests.

3.    For Editors

Editors shall strictly implement laws and national regulations, follow academic and publishing ethical standards, and maintain research integrity. Editors should process manuscripts in a timely and fair manner to keep the publishing plan and article quality. Editors shall respect the research results of authors and comments of reviewers, maintain the authentic records of the review, and keep confidential the data in all aspects of review and revision.

Editors shall have the obligation to investigate academic misconduct and communicate with authors. Once there is an appeal from authors, editors shall process the case timely. If necessary, editors shall publish corrections, clarifications, withdrawals, or apologies in a timely manner. Editors have the right to trace back the responsibility of authors and reviewers for their academic misconduct.

Editors must protect the confidentiality of authors’ submission information, as well as the identities of reviewers and editorial staff involved in the blind review process. If a conflict of interest exists between the editor and a submitted manuscript, the editor must recuse themselves from the editorial process.

Section 2 Peer Review and Editing

1.    Peer Review Policy: The journal adopts a double-blind and three-round review system. For the specific review process, please refer to the Review Process on this website.

2.    Editing Policy: Authors shall be responsible for their own writing. The editorial office of this journal could make technical and textual modifications to manuscripts. Authors should make a statement in their manuscripts if they don’t accept any modification.

3.    Timing: The review result generally will be returned to the authors within 3 months after submission. If the author does not receive a notice regarding acceptance or revision within this period, they may proceed to handle the manuscript elsewhere.

4.    Editorial Board Members and Editors as Authors: Members of the Editorial Board and journal editors who submit their own manuscripts must adhere to the same peer?review and editorial procedures as all other authors. They must not participate in the peer review, editorial handling, or publication decision for any paper authored by themselves, their family members, or their colleagues. All peer review must be conducted independently of the relevant authors, editors, or their research groups.

5.    Appeal: Authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment of the reviewers. Authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to xuebao@ecjtu.edu.cn. Detailed reasons for appealing must be stated, including a comprehensive and reasonable answer to the reviewers’ comment，and shall become valid only after being stamped by the author’s affiliated institution. The editorial office will review the appeal and decide, at its discretion, whether to accept it for further consideration.

Section 3 Correction and Retraction

1.    General Situation: Articles published online or in print are considered the final and complete version. In principle, the journal does not make corrections or retractions on published articles. However, in case of the situations described below, corrections or retractions may be carried out if truly necessary.

2.    Correction: 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, detailing the changes made to the original article and indicating the source of the article. The journal will release the corrected new version of the article, and specify the changes to the original article and the date of update. In addition, the superseded version will also be archived. Readers can obtain it directly, but only the latest version of the article should be used for citation.

3.    Retraction: In the following cases, the editorial office would retract published articles and issue retraction statements:

1) If an article is found to have severe scientific errors, making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable.

2) For articles suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, the editorial office will initiate an investigation and issue a statement to inform readers of the risks associated with the article. Once the investigation is completed, the result will be made public. If the academic misconduct is confirmed, the article will be immediately retracted and a retraction statement will be issued by the editorial office.

Section 4 Open Access, Copyright and Archive

1.    Open Access: Journal of East China Jiaotong University flipped to an open access journal in 2022. Once published, all articles will be immediately and permanently available for readers to read and download free of charge. Articles published before 2022 are not open access. Some full-text articles can be downloaded for free from the journal’s website. Copyright for these articles is held by the journal's editorial office. All open access articles are published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits third-party users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms below are followed: reusers must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Reusers may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the use. Reusers may not use the material for commercial purposes. If reusers remix, transform, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material. The authors have right to spread or make use of the article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. The full details of the license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

2.    Copyright Policy: Authors are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement. Authors shall agree to transfer the copyright of the article, including the right of compilation (part or whole of the article), translation, reproduction of printed and electronic versions, information network dissemination, and distribution, to the editorial office of Journal of East China Jiaotong University, on a global basis. Authors may cite (or translate) parts of the paper in their subsequent works or include it in collections of their non-journal publications. Authors have the right to share and use their articles according to the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

3.    Archive: Since 2018, all journal articles have been digitally archived and can be searched and downloaded from the journal website. In order to ensure data security, all information before 2018 has also been backed up in the editorial office. The hard and soft copy of each issue of the journal had been 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.

4.    Open Science and Data Sharing: The editorial office strives to respect the protection of intellectual property and requires editors, authors, and reviewers to do so. Any potential infringement should be avoided. Third-party infringement to the intellectual property of the journal is prohibited. On the premise of intellectual property protection, the journal encourages the practice of open science. Authors are encouraged to publish or share their research data whenever appropriate. The data for sharing may include original data, observation records, experimental results, etc. The journal also encourages the sharing of software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods, and other useful materials. Authors can upload the materials above to an accessible third-party repository and make a proper citation or add a link at the end of the article.