Policies and Ethics
Section 1 Ethics
Section 2 Peer Review and Editing
Section 3 Correction and Retraction
Section 4 Open Access, Copyright and Archive
Section 1 Ethics
The journal complies with the provision of Scholarly Publishing Standard – Definition of Academic Misconduct for Journals (CY/T174—2019) (accessible at “Download”), in which the misconduct of authors, reviewers and editors are defined in detail.
Misconduct of authors: plagiarism, forgery, falsification, improper authorship, multiple submission, redundant publishing, violation of scientific ethics, etc.
Misconduct of reviewers: Biased review, interfering review process, violation of requirement of competing interests, violation of confidentiality, misappropriating manuscript content, making illegitimate interests, etc.
Misconduct of editors: Making editorial comments in violation of academic ethics, violation of requirement of competing interests, violation of confidentiality, misappropriating manuscript content, interference of review process, making illegitimate interests, etc.
Authors, reviewers and editors must keep a high standard of publishing ethics during submission, reviewing and editing. Punishment shall be incurred should any misconduct be verified. If authors violate any of the above policies, the manuscript will be rejected. In case of serious infringement, authors will be banned from future submission and journal may notify other journals within the same field. The 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.
Plagiarism Detection:
The journal takes two rounds of repetition detection at initial review and before publication, by the Academic Misconduct Literature Check (AMLC) system. In general, the overall repetition rate shall be less than 10%. The standard for review articles could be appropriately relaxed. The repetition rate against another single article should be less than 7%. Should any plagiarism 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 plagiarism, a notice will be sent to the authors’ institution and other journals within the discipline.
Authorship:
In accordance with the relevant provisions of Regulation of Authorship on Academic Papers issued by the Ethic Committee of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022 (accessible at “Announcement”), this journal strictly implements the requirement prescribed by the Regulation. Once misconduct is found, it will be dealt based on the seriousness of the specific circumstances. According to guidelines of the Committee of Publishing Ethics (COPE) and other institutions, the journal requires the authors to specify their contributions in the Authors Contribution Form (accessible at “Download”) and to submit the form along with the manuscript
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 (accessible at “Download”) along with the manuscript.
Section 2 Peer Review and Editing
1. Peer Review Policy: The journal adopts double-blind and three-rounds review system. The rate of acceptance is about 15%. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript. Details can be found in the Preliminary Review Checklist of Geographical Research (accessible at “Download”). Manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be anonymously sent to two or more peer reviewers. The reviewers and the authors shall not be from the same institutes or in the same research group. The editorial office shall not disclose the information of both parties. Interdisciplinary manuscripts would be sent to experts of different disciplines accordingly. Authors must write revision statement in respond to each comment of reviewers (template is accessible at “Download“). 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.
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 the 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. If authors do not receive the notice of revision more than 3 months, they can re-submit the manuscript to another journal after confirming wiht the editorial office 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: The authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment of the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to wangdai@igsnrr.ac.cn or wanglx@igsnrr.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:
1) If an article is found to have severe scientific errors making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable;
2) 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: Geography Research adopts delayed open access policy with an embargo period. Three months after publishing, all articles will be available for readers to read and download free of charge. The full text of the current issue can be downloaded through China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). 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: Once the manuscript is accepted and published by the journal, copyright owners are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement and transfer the right of reproduction, distribution, online dissemination, translation and compilation to the editorial office of Geographical Research, i.e. the publishing department of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resource Research, CAS, free of charge all over the world. All copyright owners exclusively authorize the editorial office of Geographic Research to apply for the copyright registration of the article in any language (any media) according to actual needs.
3. Archive: All articles have been digitally archived since the journal was founded in 1982. 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.
