Editorial & Publishing Policies

Purpose of the Policy

To standardize the editorial and publishing operations of all academic journals under Macao Scientific Publishers (MOSP), uphold academic integrity, ensure publication quality, and safeguard scholarly fairness, this Editorial Policy is established to build a standardized, transparent, and internationalized editorial operating system. It draws on the editorial management norms of MDPI, a leading international academic publisher, the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the requirements of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and the relevant standards of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), while incorporating the development needs of academic publishing in Macao and the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. This Policy applies to all journal editors, editorial board members, peer reviewers, submitting authors, and other personnel involved in publishing cooperation, and serves as the core standard governing manuscript processing, academic review, publication and release, and dispute resolution.

Mission and Positioning

The journals of Macao Scientific Publishers are rooted in Macao, serve the Greater Bay Area, and reach out to the world. They focus on disseminating innovative scholarly achievements across natural sciences, engineering and technology, biomedicine, humanities and social sciences, and interdisciplinary research. Adhering to the publishing philosophy of "rigorous scholarship, open access, truth-seeking and innovation, and compliant publishing," the journals strictly control academic quality, respect scholarly originality, and advance academic exchange within the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area as well as international academic connectivity, building a standardized, high-quality, and internationalized platform for scholarly communication.

Scope of Application

This Policy covers the entire publishing process of all print and open-access electronic journals of the Publisher, including manuscript submission, initial screening, peer review, revision and acceptance, typesetting and proofreading, online publication, archiving and dissemination, academic misconduct screening, dispute appeals, and rejection and retraction. It likewise governs the professional conduct of all personnel involved in journal publishing.

Following the tiered editorial management system of MDPI and adapting it to the Publisher's operational model, an editorial structure of six levels is established — Editor-in-Chief, Executive Editor-in-Chief, Section Editor, Academic Editor, Statistical Editor, and Editorial Staff — with clearly defined authority and responsibilities, and coordinated division of labor, to ensure an efficient and compliant publishing process.

Editor-in-Chief

Oversees the overall academic direction of the journal; reviews and approves the annual publication plan, section setup, review rules, and major editorial policies; makes final decisions on difficult manuscripts, disputed manuscripts, and retraction appeal manuscripts; and is responsible for editorial board development, academic quality control, and journal brand building, bearing overall responsibility for the journal's academic reputation.

Executive Editor-in-Chief

Assists the Editor-in-Chief in day-to-day academic management; coordinates the review progress of manuscripts across all sections; supervises the standardization of the peer review process; handles routine academic disputes; reviews the final content of each issue before publication; and coordinates communication among editors, peer reviewers, and authors, ensuring that the publication cycle remains stable and controllable.

Section Editor / Special Issue Editor

Responsible for the initial screening of manuscripts in the corresponding disciplinary section or special issue, and for inviting special issue manuscripts and soliciting commissioned articles; selects peer reviewers matched to the field, follows up on the review progress, and issues preliminary evaluation opinions; and controls the academic frontier relevance and content innovation of the section, improving its overall academic quality. Manuscripts for special issue collections are subject to coordinated review by dedicated special issue editors, with the process filed and managed separately.

Academic Editor

Composed of senior experts in various disciplinary fields, the core responsibility is to review the academic content of manuscripts, evaluating research methods, novelty, scholarly value, and the rigor of conclusions; proposes revision suggestions for academic deficiencies in manuscripts; and provides professional academic advice on the results of initial and follow-up reviews, underpinning the core academic quality control of the journal.

Statistical Editor

Following the MDPI statistical review standards, dedicated to verifying the statistical methods of manuscript data, the authenticity of experimental data, and the standardization of data analysis, ensuring that research data are reproducible, results are verifiable, and conclusions are free from bias; focuses on examining mathematical models, experimental statistics, sample analysis, and data presentation, eliminating data fabrication, statistical misuse, and result tampering, so as to safeguard the rigor and transparency of research findings. The initial term of appointment is two years, and renewal is subject to a satisfactory performance review upon expiration.

Editorial Staff

Responsible for routine operational work including manuscript submission registration, preliminary format review, plagiarism screening, process follow-up, language editing, typesetting and proofreading, publication and release, archiving, and author communication; strictly implements this Editorial Policy, standardizes all procedures, and records the manuscript processing track, ensuring that the publishing process is standardized, normalized, and traceable.

Fully benchmarking against MDPI's standardized publishing process, a closed-loop workflow is established covering initial screening and preliminary review, peer review, revision and re-review, final review and acceptance, typesetting and publication, and archiving and public disclosure, with clear time limits and standards for each stage, so as to improve publication efficiency and standardization.

Initial Screening and Format Review

Upon submission, the editorial staff conduct the initial screening without delay, checking whether the manuscript falls within the journal's scope, whether it has been submitted to multiple journals simultaneously, whether the format is compliant, and whether the supplementary materials are complete. The manuscript structure is strictly reviewed and must follow the IMRAD structured abstract standard, comprising the four core modules of research background, research methods, key results, and conclusions, free of redundant or irrelevant content. Manuscripts that fail the initial screening are returned directly, with the authors clearly informed of the directions for revision or the reasons for rejection, so as to eliminate ineffective review assignments.

    Key points checked during initial screening: disciplinary fit of the manuscript, originality, format compliance, completeness of funding and ethics statements, clarity of figures and tables, and the standardization of references. Manuscripts that are empty in content, poorly formatted, or deviating from the journal's positioning are rejected.

Academic Preliminary Review

Manuscripts passing the initial screening are subject to academic preliminary review by the corresponding Section Editor, who focuses on evaluating the novelty of the research, the value of the topic, the feasibility of the study, and the scientific soundness of the content, as well as verifying the authors' research qualifications and foundation, and screening for obvious academic deficiencies. Manuscripts that pass the preliminary review proceed to peer review; those with minor deficiencies that can be remedied are returned to the authors with a deadline for revision before re-review; manuscripts without academic value or with major defects are rejected directly at the preliminary review stage.

Peer Review Mechanism

A double-blind peer review system is adopted, with strict measures to avoid conflicts of interest and ensure fairness and impartiality. All manuscripts sent for review are evaluated by at least two or more authoritative reviewers in the same field; for particularly difficult manuscripts and manuscripts of high novelty, one or two additional external reviewers are engaged for verification.

    Reviewers must issue independent review opinions, clearly indicating one of four conclusions — accept, accept after revision, revise and re-review, or reject — and detailing the basis of the review, the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, and specific revision suggestions. Editorial staff follow up on the review progress throughout, collect review reports in a timely manner, and coordinate communication between authors and reviewers for questions and clarification.

    Where multiple review opinions diverge, the Executive Editor-in-Chief organizes the Academic Editors to conduct a joint re-assessment and issue the final review recommendation, ensuring that review results are objective and fair.

Manuscript Revision and Re-review

For manuscripts requiring revision, authors are notified of a unified revision deadline; the revision period for regular manuscripts does not exceed ten working days. Authors must respond to the reviewers' comments point by point and submit a response letter, the revised manuscript, and the original supplementary materials. Upon completion of revision, the manuscript is returned to the original reviewers for re-review to verify that the revisions have been implemented and the issues effectively addressed. Manuscripts requiring extensive additional experiments or substantial restructuring of core content are rejected; after completing a full revision, the authors may resubmit, and the resubmission will be assigned a new manuscript number with the review process restarted from the beginning.

Final Review and Acceptance

Manuscripts that pass the re-review undergo tiered final review by the Executive Editor-in-Chief and the Editor-in-Chief, who comprehensively re-examine the academic quality, completeness of revisions, ethical compliance, and authenticity of data. Once confirmed to be free of issues, the manuscript is accepted. Manuscripts failing the final review are given explicit reasons for rejection; the result of the final-review rejection is final and is not subject to further appeal or re-examination.

Typesetting, Proofreading, and Publication

Accepted manuscripts enter the production stage, where a dedicated team completes language polishing, formatting and typesetting, figure and table optimization, XML and PDF conversion, and a second round of proofreading, eliminating typographical errors, formatting problems, and distorted figures or tables. After proofreading, the manuscript is submitted to the authors for final confirmation of the version of record; once no objections remain, it is formally published online or in print, with archiving, copyright registration, and database indexing notification completed at the same time.

Strictly adhering to the COPE and ICMJE international publishing ethics guidelines, we uphold the academic bottom line and comprehensively regulate the core issues of manuscript ethics, authorship qualification, data compliance, image standards, and conflicts of interest, eliminating all forms of academic misconduct.

Authorship Qualification Standards

Authorship and signature requirements are strictly defined: only individuals who have made substantive contributions to the research design, experimental implementation, data compilation, manuscript writing, or results review are entitled to authorship, and practices such as honorary authorship, false attribution, and unauthorized signing are prohibited. All authors must complete real-name registration in the submission system, indicating their affiliations, funding projects, and research contributions. The corresponding author bears full academic and publication responsibility for the manuscript.

Research Ethics Compliance

Manuscripts involving human trials, clinical research, or patient samples must provide approval documents from a properly constituted ethics committee and proof of informed consent from participants, and must strictly comply with the ICMJE clinical trial registration requirements: clinical trials must be registered in a public registry before the enrollment of the first participant, and manuscripts of clinical studies without completed registration will not be accepted for publication. Manuscripts involving animal experiments must provide animal ethics approval certificates and strictly follow the guidelines for the humane treatment of animals.

Data and Image Standards

Authors must guarantee that research data are authentic, complete, traceable, and reproducible. Concealing, altering, or fabricating experimental data is prohibited, and vague formulations such as "data not shown" are strictly disallowed; authors are encouraged to submit raw observational data as supplementary material with the manuscript. All images in manuscripts are strictly prohibited from artificial tampering or retouching: adding or removing image features, splicing unrelated images, adjusting contrast or brightness to conceal original information, and mixing images from different experiments are all forbidden. Any such violation is handled as academic misconduct.

Academic Misconduct Investigation Mechanism

Academic misconduct is screened throughout the entire process, including plagiarism, simultaneous submission, duplicate publication, data fabrication, image manipulation, ghostwriting or paid authorship, and improper attribution. All submitted manuscripts undergo plagiarism screening; manuscripts exceeding the similarity threshold are rejected directly. If academic misconduct is discovered after publication, the retraction procedure is immediately initiated, a retraction notice is issued, the offending authors are placed on the Publisher's blacklist with a permanent ban on submission, and the matter is reported to the authors' institutions and relevant academic organizations.

Conflicts of Interest and Confidentiality Standards

Editors, editorial board members, and peer reviewers must proactively declare conflicts of interest; those with mentor–student, collaborative, or financial relationships  with the manuscript authors or research projects must recuse themselves from the review of the manuscript. The entire manuscript review process is kept strictly confidential: the content of manuscripts, the identities of peer reviewers, and review opinions must not be disclosed, and unpublished manuscripts must not be circulated without authorization, so as to safeguard the independence and confidentiality of academic review.

Manuscript Writing Requirements

Manuscripts must be well-structured, logically clear, and linguistically standardized, comprising the core sections of abstract, keywords, introduction, research methods, experimental results, analysis and discussion, conclusions, and references. The abstract is written in a structured format covering the full scope of background, methods, results, and conclusions, without paragraph breaks or headings. The inclusion of web links, redundant formulas, superfluous figures and tables, and irrelevant layout elements is prohibited in the abstract and main text, so as to keep the text concise and standardized.

Reference Standards

References must be authentic and valid, from legitimate sources, and in a uniform format. Priority is given to high-quality core domestic and international literature published within the past five years. The citation of unpublished data, uncompleted projects, and fabricated references is prohibited. References must strictly follow national standards and internationally recognized citation formats, with complete information on authors, titles, journal names, years, volumes, issues, and page numbers, and practices such as fabricated citations, mis-citations, omissions, and excessive self-citation are eliminated.

Open-Access Publishing and Copyright Standards

The journals of the Publisher adopt an open-access publishing model: once published, the full text is openly disseminated to facilitate the rapid sharing of academic achievements. By submitting a manuscript, authors sign the copyright agreement, confirming that the manuscript is original and compliant and free of copyright disputes; the Publisher holds the legitimate rights to publish, disseminate, archive, and promote the manuscript, while authors retain the rights to attribution (authorship) and non-commercial use. All publicly published manuscripts are retrievable, traceable, and archivable throughout, ensuring the standardized dissemination of academic achievements.

Manuscript Decision Types

The final decision on a manuscript falls into one of four categories: accept for publication, accept after revision, revise and re-review, and reject directly. Every decision is accompanied by a detailed written explanation that clearly states the basis of the decision and the core issues, ensuring that decisions are transparent and well-grounded.

Appeal Handling Process

Authors who disagree with the review outcome of their manuscript may submit a written appeal application within seven working days of the decision notice, detailing the grounds for the appeal and providing supporting evidence. The Editor-in-Chief of the Publisher takes the lead in forming a dedicated review panel, which independently re-examines the manuscript and the review records and issues the final review result within ten working days. The result of this review is final and no second appeal is accepted. Malicious appeals without reasonable grounds and repeated appeals will result in termination of the review process, and the matter will be recorded in the author's integrity file.

Editorial Work Principles

All editorial personnel must uphold the working principles of objectivity, fairness, rigor, and self-discipline. "Relationship manuscripts," "connection-based manuscripts," and paid peer review are strictly prohibited, and no one may exploit their position for personal gain. Publication deadlines must be strictly observed, with manuscript review, proofreading, and publication processed efficiently and without delay, backlogs, or perfunctory performance of duties. Publishing information must be kept strictly confidential to safeguard the journal's academic reputation.

Assessment and Renewal Mechanism

An annual assessment mechanism is established for editors, editorial board members, and peer reviewers, with indicators covering review quality, review timeliness, academic professionalism, compliance with duties, and service satisfaction. Those rated excellent are given priority for renewal and involvement in journal development; those rated unqualified, or found to have violated their duties, committed academic misconduct, or caused publication delays, are dismissed or have their review qualifications revoked, and those with serious violations are held accountable accordingly. Editors, Statistical Editors, and similar positions have an initial term of two years, and renewal is subject to a satisfactory performance review upon expiration.

This Editorial Policy is subject to interpretation by Macao Scientific Publishers (MOSP) and will be revised and improved in due course in light of international publishing standards, academic industry norms, and the development needs of the Publisher. This Policy takes effect on the date of its issuance. Where any pre-existing editorial management regulations are inconsistent with this Policy, this Policy shall prevail.