Scientia Geographica Sinica follows guidelines of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE), and the national standards CY/T174-2019 Academic publishing specification -Definition of academic misconduct for journals. Authors should carefully read the Policies page of this website and prepare their manuscript accordingly. For detailed instructions on publishing scope, submission methods and manuscript requirement, please refer to the Submission Instruction, Revision Guideline, Manuscript Template, and Requirement for Figures and Maps on this website.

Section 1 Ethics
　　Authors, reviewers and editors must keep a high standard of publishing ethics during submission, reviewing and editing. Punishment shall be imposed should any misconduct be verified. If authors violate any ethical policy, the manuscript will be rejected. In case of serious circumstances, authors will be banned from future submission and this journal may notify other journals within the same field. This journal shall strictly comply with professional and ethical standard, focus on the quality of manuscripts, treat authors equally regardless of their background, titles and institutes, and avoid personal relationship interfering the reviewing process.

For Authors
1. Repetition Detection: Plagiarism, multiple submission and redundant publishing is strictly prohibited. All submitted articles shall be tested by the Academic Misconduct Literature Check (AMLC) system developed by CNKI. The overall repetition rate shall be less than 15%. Should any plagiarism/multiple submission/redundant publishing be found, the manuscript shall be rejected at any stage of the review or publishing process, or be retracted if the manuscript has already been published. In case of serious misconduct, a notice will be sent to the authors’ institution and other journals within the discipline.
2. Authorship: This journal strictly implements the requirement prescribed by the provisions of Regulation of Authorship on Academic Papers issued by the Ethic Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. Once any misconduct is found, it will be dealt based on the seriousness of the specific circumstances. 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. The Authors Contribution Form should be signed and provided when making submission.
3. Disclosure of Competing Interests: 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 Statement of Competing Interests along with the manuscript.
4. Forgery: Forgery refers to data or conclusions that are not obtained from experiments or research, but are forged and tampered by authors. Date forgery is strictly prohibited.

For Reviewers
1. Reviewers shall guarantee that they review the manuscripts accurately, objective and fairly on the basis of scientific quality. They should use their professional knowledge and ability to review the innovation, scientificity and practicability of manuscripts, and give a fair evaluation on whether the research method is appropriate, whether the scientific research design is reasonable, whether the results and conclusions are accurate, and whether confidential issues is involved, so as to help editors select manuscripts. They should put forward detailed comments for problems of manuscripts to help authors make revision.
2. Reviewers should respect the research achievements of authors and avoid reviewing manuscripts with competing interests. The review will only be based on academical standards instead of personal reasons. 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.
3. Reviewers shall complete comments on the manuscripts and feed back to the editorial office within specified time. In case of any difficulty, the editorial office should be informed in time.
4. Reviewers shall keep confidential the content of the manuscripts strictly, and shall not release to or discuss the manuscripts with other people, nor use/publish the data, opinions and conclusions from the manuscripts.
5. All review comments and information must be kept confidential and not used for personal purposes.
6. Reviewers should avoid processing manuscripts for which they have competing interests.

For Editors
1. 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 publishing plan and article quality.
2. 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 during review and revision. Editors and editorial staff shall not disclose any information related to the submitted manuscripts except for providing necessary information to correspondence authors, reviewers and editorial committee members as appropriate.
3. Editors shall select articles fairly, and the acceptance or rejection of articles can only be based on originality, significance, clarity of the article and whether it conforms to the aim and scope of the journal.
4. Editors should encourage academic debate and are obliged to answer questions raised by authors against review comments and results.
5. Editors shall have 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. 
6. Editors shall protect the information submitted by authors and the identity information of reviewers and other relevant personnel in the editorial office during blind review process.
7. Editors should avoid processing manuscripts for which they have competing interests.


Section 2 Peer Review and Editing
1. Peer Review Policy: The journal adopts double-blind review system. All submitted article shall be assigned to a responsible editor. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript. Manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be anonymously sent to two or more peer reviewers. The editorial office shall not disclose the information of both parties. Authors must write revision statement in respond to each comment of reviewers (please refer to the Revision Guideline). The Editor-in-Chief will conduct the final round of review and the editorial office shall impartially select manuscripts on the basis of academic quality and review comment. Besides the traditional three-round review, there is an additional round of review by responsible editor to make sure the review process is rigorous and fair. The acceptance rate of manuscripts is approximately 15%.
2. Editing Policy: All authors shall be responsible for their own writing. For accepted manuscripts, the journal may make some technical or wording amendments. Any amendment involving change of meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation.
3. Timing: The review result generally will be returned to the authors within 3 months after submission. In a few cases the review could be overdue. Authors are generally required to return the revised article within one month. For special circumstances, please contact us by phone or E-mail. 
4. Submission by Editors: The editorial staff / editors / editorial board members should not be involved in publishing decisions on papers which they have written themselves or have been written by their family members or colleagues. Any such submission should be strictly subject to the journal’s usual editorial process. Peer review should be handled independently from the relevant author/editor and their research groups.
5. Appeal: Authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment from the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to geoscien@neigae.ac.cn. Detailed reasons for appealing must be stated, including a comprehensive and reasonable answer to the reviewers’ comment. The appeal letter should also be stamped by the author’s institute. The editorial department will consider whether to change the decision case by case.

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:
　　a) If an article is found to have severe scientific errors making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable;
　　b) For article 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 & Archive
1. OA Policy: Scientia Geographica Sinica flipped to an open-access journal in 2022. Once published, all articles shall be immediately and permanently available for readers to read and download free of charge. Full contents of articles published in 1981 ~ 2022 are available on this website for free and open access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Permitted third party reuse of the articles published by the journal is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows reusers 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. 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: Authors are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement. Once the submitted article is published in the journal, authors agree that the copyright of the article (including but not limited to the right of reproduction, distribution, online dissemination, performance, translation, compilation, adaptation, etc.) will be transferred to the editorial office of Scientia Geographica Sinica worldwide. 
3. Archive: All articles have been digitally archived since the journal was founded in 1981. They can be searched and downloaded from the journal website. In order to ensure data security, all information has also been backed up in the editorial office. In addition, other relevant materials are also kept by the editorial office, such as supplementary information and forms provided by the authors. After publication, the full text of the article can be retrieved through China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI).
4. Data Sharing: The authors are encouraged to publish or share their research data whenever appropriate. Data sharing is helpful for experiment repeating and data reuse. The data for sharing may include original data, observation records, experimental results, etc. According to relevant provision on data management by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, this journal requires authors affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences to deposit the data of their manuscript in ScienceDB. Authors from other institutes are also encouraged to deposit the date in there. Software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials could be upload to an accessible third-party repository as long as a proper citation or link given in the article.

5.Charging and Renumeration

　　The journal doesn’t charge any submission fee. Except for invited manuscript, an APC will be payable after the manuscript is accepted (RMB 300 per page),Extra long articles increase page publishing costs. process fee shall be charged for color pages (RMB 800 per page). Review fee (RMB 400 per article) shall be charged for accepted manuscripts and NOT charged for rejected manuscripts. The full text of all articles of the journal will be included by CNKI, the renumeration shall be sent to authors after publication.

6.This journal doesn’t publish commercial advertisement.