Editorial policies

Open access statement

The standard Article Processing Charge (APC) is USD 300 per accepted article. This fee supports the essential costs associated with editorial administration, peer review management, publication production, digital infrastructure, and the long term operation of the journal.

For authors who require expedited processing due to academic, institutional, or other time sensitive circumstances, an optional expedited processing fee of USD 20 to USD 40 may apply, depending on the level and timeframe of the service requested. Expedited processing does not influence editorial decisions, peer review standards, or acceptance outcomes.

APYCF is committed to ensuring that financial circumstances do not create unnecessary barriers to scholarly participation. Authors experiencing financial hardship, as well as those from underrepresented, disadvantaged, or other circumstances requiring special consideration, are encouraged to contact the Editorial Office. Requests for APC reductions, waivers, or other forms of financial assistance will be considered on a case by case basis.

Any request for financial assistance is handled independently of the editorial and peer review process and will not affect the evaluation or publication decision of a manuscript.

Published articles remain free to read, download and print from the moment of publication, with no subscription, registration or payment required of readers, and no embargo period. Articles are published under an open licence (see Licensing and copyright) which permits reuse with attribution.

Financial Assistance

APYCF is committed to ensuring that financial circumstances do not create unnecessary barriers to scholarly participation. Authors experiencing financial hardship, as well as those from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds or other circumstances requiring special consideration, are encouraged to contact the Editorial Office to discuss available support.

Requests for APC reductions, waivers, or other forms of financial assistance will be considered on a case by case basis.

When contacting us, please clearly provide the following information so that we can review your request efficiently:

• Manuscript ID, if available, or the full manuscript title
• Name of the corresponding author
• Author affiliation, including institution and country
• A brief explanation of the financial circumstances or other reasons supporting the request

For financial assistance inquiries, please contact accounting@apycfoundation.org.

Requests for financial assistance are handled independently of the editorial and peer review process and will not affect the evaluation, acceptance, or publication decision of a manuscript.

Licensing and copyright

Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Anyone may copy, redistribute, adapt and build upon the work, including for commercial purposes, provided the original authors and the source are credited and any changes are indicated.

Authors retain copyright in their work. Submitting to these journals does not transfer copyright to the publisher; authors grant the Editorial Office a licence to publish and to distribute the article under the terms above.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any third-party material in their manuscript, and for confirming that such permission covers the licence under which the article will be published.

Peer review process

All research and review articles are assessed by double-blind peer review: authors are not told who reviewed their manuscript, and reviewers are not told who wrote it.

How anonymity is maintained

Anonymity is enforced by the submission system rather than left to the author's care. A submission requires two separate files: a title page carrying the full author list, affiliations, acknowledgements and funding, and an anonymised manuscript. Only the anonymised file is made available to reviewers; requests for the title page or the original submission are refused by the system.

Before a submission is accepted into the workflow, the anonymised file is checked automatically for author names, institutional names, email addresses, acknowledgement sections, funding identifiers, and the document properties that word processors record without the author's knowledge. A submission that fails any of these checks is returned with the specific items to correct. Revised manuscripts are checked again, because they are returned to the same reviewers.

Stages

1. Technical check. The Editorial Office confirms the submission is complete, within scope, and accompanied by the required declarations, and reviews the integrity screening report (see Similarity and AI-writing screening).
2. Editor assignment. A handling editor takes responsibility for the manuscript. An editor who is an author of the manuscript, or who has a conflict of interest, cannot take it.
3. Review. The handling editor invites reviewers. A decision requires at least two independent reviews in the round on which it is based.
4. Decision. The handling editor recommends acceptance, minor revision, major revision, or rejection, and writes to the corresponding author with the reviewers' comments.
5. Revision. Authors upload a revised manuscript with a point-by-point response to each reviewer. Both are returned to the reviewers for the next round.
6. Final decision. The Editor-in-Chief or a delegated senior editor makes the final decision.

What reviewers see and do not see

Reviewers receive the anonymised manuscript, its title and abstract, and the article type. They do not receive the author list, the cover letter, the integrity screening scores, the identity of the handling editor, or the identity or comments of the other reviewers.

Reviewers provide comments addressed to the author and, separately, confidential comments addressed to the editor. Confidential comments are never shown to authors.

Reviewer identities

Reviewer identities are not published and are not disclosed to authors, before or after publication. Every action taken on a manuscript is recorded in an internal audit log, which is available to the Editorial Office should the conduct of a review be questioned.

Timelines

Reviewers are asked to return a report within 21 days of accepting an invitation. Reminders are sent before the due date, on the due date, and if a report becomes overdue. These journals do not guarantee a decision within a fixed period: a review that arrives late is preferable to a decision taken without it.

Submission guidance

Prepare the manuscript in this template. It is the file reviewers are given, and it carries no author identities.

Before uploading the anonymised manuscript

The submission system checks each of these and returns the specific items it finds, so a manuscript that fails is not rejected — it is sent back to be corrected.

• No author or affiliation names in the text, in headers, or in footers.
• No acknowledgements and no funding identifiers. A funder or a thanked colleague identifies an author as surely as a name does.
• Self-citations written in the third person — “Guo (2024) found”, not “we previously found”.
• Document properties cleared. Word records the author of a file whether or not the name appears in the text: File → Info → Check for Issues → Inspect Document, then remove Document Properties and Personal Information. This is the check most submissions fail, because nothing on screen shows the name.

Naming and order

Write each author exactly as the name should be printed. Nothing reorders them: some names are written family name first and some are not, and no software can tell which is which.

Revisions

A revised manuscript is uploaded with a point-by-point response to each reviewer, and is checked for anonymity again before it goes back — revisions return to the same reviewers, so a name introduced during revision would undo the anonymity of the whole round.

Conflicts of interest

Authors must declare any financial or personal relationship that could be seen to influence the work. Editors and reviewers must decline to handle a manuscript where such a relationship exists.

The submission system refuses a reviewer invitation where the address belongs to an author of the manuscript, where the person is the handling editor, or where they are already assigned. Where a candidate reviewer shares an institutional email domain or an affiliation with an author, the invitation is held until the handling editor records an explicit judgement that the overlap does not amount to a conflict. That judgement is recorded in the audit log.

Similarity and AI-writing screening

Every submission is screened automatically for textual similarity against published literature, and for indicators of machine-generated text. The report is available to the handling editor during the technical check.

Screening results are evidence for an editor, not a decision. A manuscript is never rejected because of a score. A shared methods description and genuine duplication can produce similar similarity figures, and AI-writing indicators are probabilistic. Where a score is high, the handling editor examines the flagged passages and, where appropriate, asks the authors for an explanation before taking any action.

Authors must disclose any use of generative AI tools in the preparation of the manuscript, including which tool and for what purpose. AI tools cannot be listed as authors: authorship requires accountability for the work, which a tool cannot hold.

Publication ethics and misconduct

These journals follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines in handling allegations of misconduct, including plagiarism, data fabrication, image manipulation, duplicate submission, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and disputes over authorship.

Allegations are investigated by the Editorial Office. Where an allegation concerns a member of the editorial board, that person takes no part in the investigation. The corresponding author is given the opportunity to respond before any action is taken.

Research involving human participants

Studies involving human participants must state the name of the approving ethics committee and the approval reference, and must confirm that informed consent was obtained. Manuscripts that do not are returned without review.

Corrections and retractions

Where a published article requires correction, a correction notice is published and linked from the article. Where findings are no longer reliable, the article is retracted: the original article remains available, marked as retracted, with a retraction notice stating the reason. Articles are not removed from the record.

Publishing fees

The Article Processing Charge is USD 300 per accepted article, payable only after acceptance. An optional expedited processing fee of USD 20 to USD 40 may apply where an author requests it; it does not influence editorial decisions, peer review standards or acceptance outcomes.

There is no submission fee, no page charge and no colour figure charge. Reading and downloading articles is free and always will be.

Reductions, waivers and other assistance are available — see Financial Assistance. Any change to these charges will be published on this page before it applies, and will not be applied to manuscripts already under review.

Authorship

Authorship is limited to those who made a substantial contribution to the work and who can take public responsibility for it. Everyone who meets this standard must be listed; no one who does not may be listed.

The corresponding author confirms on submission that all listed authors have seen and approved the manuscript and agree to its submission. Requests to add, remove or reorder authors after submission must come from the corresponding author with the written agreement of every author affected, and are recorded.

Contributions that do not meet the standard for authorship — funding, general supervision, technical assistance, language editing — belong in the acknowledgements, on the title page.

Digital preservation

Articles are published as HTML reading pages and as PDF files, and are held in the Editorial Office's own systems. A long-term preservation arrangement with an external archive has not yet been established, and this page will state the arrangement once it is in place.

Authors are encouraged to deposit the published version in their institutional repository. The licence under which articles are published permits this without further permission.

Complaints and appeals

Authors who wish to appeal an editorial decision should write to the Editorial Office setting out the grounds for the appeal. Appeals are considered by an editor who was not involved in the original decision. An appeal is not a second review: it asks whether the process was followed properly.

Complaints about the conduct of a review, about the handling of a manuscript, or about the behaviour of an editor should be sent to outreach@apycfoundation.org. Complaints are acknowledged within ten working days.

Data availability

Authors are asked to state where the data underlying their findings can be found. Where data cannot be shared — because of participant confidentiality, third-party restrictions, or legal constraint — the statement should say so and explain why.

Depositing data in a recognised repository and citing it in the article is encouraged. A data availability statement is required in every research article.

Privacy

The Editorial Office collects the personal data needed to operate peer review: names, email addresses, affiliations, and the record of actions taken on manuscripts. Reviewer identities are held confidentially and are not disclosed to authors.

Account passwords are never stored. What is kept is a scrypt hash from which the password cannot be recovered, held on this platform's own systems. If sign-in is ever moved to an external service, this page will say so and name it before the change takes effect.

Manuscripts under review are confidential. Reviewers and editors may not share a manuscript, or use its content, before publication.