Publishing Ethics
Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering is committed to meeting the international ethical standards at all stages of the publication process. In accordance with the relevant guidelines published by the Committee of Publishing Ethics (COPE) and combined with the actual situation of the journal, we have formulated the ethical standards for the publication of the journal:
1. Editor Responsibility
1.1 Editors should handle all manuscripts in a fair and objective way without any discrimination, so that manuscripts are accepted or rejected solely on their academic merit.
1.2 If editor becomes aware of any conflict of interest with a manuscript, then the editor should take the initiative to explain the situation and recuse himself or herself from editorial work of the manuscript.
1.3 Editors should follow the procedures suggested by COPE in the event of complaints of academic misconduct, and give the author involved a reasonable opportunity to respond to the complaint. Whether or not the manuscript under complaint is published, the complaint should be investigated carefully and all documentation relating to the complaint should be retained.
2. Reviewer Responsibility
2.1 Reviewers should contribute to the decision-making of accepting or rejecting a manuscript, and assist in improving the quality of the manuscript by objective review. Any information supplied to reviewers by the Editorial Department should remain confidential.
2.2 Reviewers should inform the Editorial Department immediately if they found any published content is substantially similar to the manuscript under his/her review. They should also inform the Editorial Department if they have any potential conflicts of interest with the manuscript.
3. Author Responsibility
3.1 Authors should ensure that manuscripts submitted to Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering have never been officially published in print, online or any other media. In addition, authors should ensure that their manuscripts do not involve multiple submissions.
3.2 Authors should ensure that the data and results in their manuscripts are concrete and reliable, and no fabricated or manipulated data, no dispute in copyright. Manuscripts should contain necessary details and references to allow others to repeat the research. Authors may be asked to provide the original data to the editor for review and any reasonable requests for data should not be denied. Authors should notify the Editorial Department in a timely manner when they find any significant error or inaccuracy in their published work, and cooperate with the Editorial Department to retract or correct the article.
3.3 Authors should ensure that proper citations to other works are given in the manuscript. Plagiarism (including self-plagiarism) is not allowed.
3.4 Authors should ensure that no confidential information is involved in manuscripts. Authors shall be solely responsible for any confidential breaks. Furthermore, advertising or other business promotion is not allowed in manuscripts.
3.5 Authorship Criteria: All authors must have materially contributed to the research or the article. They should have made substantial contributions to the following: conception and design of the study, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content. For those who contribute but not listed as authors, their efforts should be appreciated in the manuscript. Authors should ensure that there are no disputes over the authorship, authorship order and authors’ affiliations. After submission, no further authors can be added to or removed from the author list, and the order of authors cannot be changed.
3.6 Author Contribution Statement: In order to discourage and prevent academic misconduct such as nominal author, authors are required to disclosure their individual contributions to the article by filling in and submitting the “Author Contribution Statement”, which is enclosed in the “Copyright Transfer Agreement & Academic Standards Commitment Letter” in the Download page.
3.7 Conflict of Interest Statement: To disclose all potential competing interests involved in the research, authors are required to fill in and submit the “Conflict of Interest Statement”, which is enclosed in the “Copyright Transfer Agreement & Academic Standards Commitment Letter” in the Download page. A conflict of interest may exist when an author (or the author’s institution or employer) has financial or personal relationships or affiliations that could influence (or bias) the author’s decisions, work, or manuscript. Authors should also disclose conflicts of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.
4. Academic Misconduct
Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering only accepts original research works that have not been published and submitted to other journals. Academic misconducts including plagiarism, fabricated data, multi-submission, redundant publishing are strictly prohibited. All submitted manuscripts shall be checked by the "Academic Misconduct Literature Detection System" developed by CNKI to avoid plagiarism and overly high rate of repetition. The repetition rate should not be higher than 10% and manuscripts with an overly high repetition rate will be rejected in the preliminary review.
Manuscripts found to be guilty of academic misconduct will be immediately rejected by the Editorial Department. If the manuscript has already been published, the journal will make corrections or even retract the article depending on the nature and severity of the misconduct. If a published paper is retracted, the journal will notify the institutions of relevant authors.
5. Appeal and Discussion
5.1 The journal allows authors to appeal. If authors have any disagreement to the review comments or review results, they could submit a written appeal to the Editorial Department by sending it to the journal’s email (13941816@qq.com). Author who submits the appeal needs to make detailed explanation for each review comment. After receiving the appeal, the Editorial Department will investigate and deal with it as soon as possible, and the result of the appeal will be fed back to the author.
5.2 We welcome authors and readers to make discussion on the journal’s published articles. Comments can be sent to the journal’s email (13941816@qq.com). The Editorial Department will deal with it as soon as possible and give feedback as appropriate. We welcome readers and authors to actively provide their comments on the articles to the journal, which can help us to create a positive academic atmosphere.
6. Correction and Retraction
6.1 Cases when corrections of the published articles are considered: If there appears to be an unintended scientific mistake in an article which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusion, the Editorial Department will publish correction statement in the journal as soon as possible, detailing the changes made to the original 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. Readers shall cite the corrected version of the article.
6.2 Cases when retractions of the published articles are considered: If academic misconduct including plagiarism, fabricated data, multiple submission is confirmed, the Editorial Department would retract the article, issue a retraction statement, and notify the institutions of the authors. In addition, when an article is found to have severe scientific errors, which make the results and conclusions of the article unreliable, the Editorial Department will retract the article and issue a retraction statement.
7. Digital Archive and Online Accessibility
Articles published by the journal since its establishment have been digitally archived on the journal’s official website, through which readers can directly access the articles online. All information and material are backed up in the Editorial Department for security reason, including the print-copy and digital-copy of all issues, and all other relevant material (e.g., authors’ additional information and forms submitted during submission).
In addition to archiving on our official website, the full-text of the journal’s articles is also stored in the databases of CNKI, Wanfang Data, etc. Readers can access the above-mentioned databases and platforms to obtain the articles published by the journal.
It is allowed for authors to deposit all versions of their articles in an institutional or other repository of the authors’ choice. However, it is necessary to indicate the articles’ publishing information in the metadata in the institutional or other repository and use that as a recommended way of citation.
8. Advertising Policy
To help promote the industry to the community of researchers and professionals, the journal welcomes advertising partners, especially in the following sectors:: geological exploration equipment, survey instrument, earth-moving machine, lifting transport equipment, quarry and concrete equipment, manufacturing and repair equipment, engineering ship, equipment for basic processing , irrigation and drainage machinery, testing instrument, metallic structures, mechanical and electrical installation equipment, power equipment, water turbine and generator equipment, automation device of hydropower station, electricity transmission and distribution equipment, and construction and electricity materials.
The content of the advertisement shall be in compliance with the Advertising Law. The Editorial Department will review it in accordance with relevant laws and regulations and examine and verify the advertisers’ documentary evidence, such as the business license. Advertisement that fails to conform to the relevant rules of the Law, that has discrepancy between its promotion and the real product, and that is deficient of documentary evidence would not be published.
Advertisement shall be published on the front cover and the back cover of the print journal, which is separated from academic articles. The journal firmly states that the published advertisement would not affect the review, editing, or publishing decisions of any manuscripts.