Section 1: Ethics
Section 2: Peer Review and Editing
Section 3: Correction and Retraction
Section 4: Open Access, Copyright and Archive
Section 5: Advertisement Policy

Section 1：Ethics

1.Ethics for Reviewers and Editors: Reviewers and editors should comply with the following standards in their work:
(1)Reviewers and editors must process manuscripts fairly and impartially. The selection criteria should be only based on quality, innovation, scientificity, practicality, and the requirement of the publishing scope.
(2)Reviewers and editors should keep confidential of the manuscript content, author information and review comment.
(3)Reviewers and editors should respect the research achievements of authors and should not disclose or use data of unpublished articles without authorization.
(4)If any academic misconduct is found in the manuscript, reviewers and editors shall handle the case impartially.
(5)If there is a conflict of interest, reviewers and editors should report it to the editorial office or editorial board and avoiding handling the manuscript.

2.Ethics for Authors: Authors should comply with the following standards in their work:

(1)Plagiarism: All manuscripts would be tested by the Academic Misconduct Literature Check (AMLC) system developed by CNKI. In general, the overall repetition rate shall be less than 8%. Authors should ensure the originality and integrity of the article, without any plagiarism, forgery, tampering and fraud, and that the article has not been published on other journals before. Once any academic misconduct is verified, the journal will immediately reject the manuscript. Further punishment may be incurred according to relevant regulations.
(2) Authorship: Those who are named as authors should directly participate in the research and writing work. They should be responsible for the manuscript. “Gift author” is strictly prohibited. The signature, order of authors, institutes and the corresponding authors shall be collectively determined before submission and shall not be changed thereafter. The authors should specify their contribution in the Authors Contribution Form and submit it along with the manuscript.
(3) Conflicts of Interest: 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 the Statement of Competing Interests along with the manuscript.

3.Intellectual Property and Open Science: The editorial office strives to respect the protection of intellectual property and requires editors, authors and reviewers to do so. Any potential infringement should be avoided. Third-party infringement to the intellectual property of the journal is prohibited. On the premise of intellectual property protection, the journal encourages the practice of open science. Authors are encouraged to publish or share their research data whenever appropriate. 

4.Handling of Academic Misconduct: The journal editorial committee will discuss and determine whether there is an academic misconduct and what is the punishment. Should forgery of data, multiple submission or plagiarism be found, the manuscript will be rejected immediately and the journal will not accept submission from the authors involved in two years. An announcement shall be published and the institutes of the authors shall be notified. All consequences shall be borne by authors. For other types of academic misconduct, once verified, the case will be handled according to national standards and international guidelines, depending on the specific circumstances.

Section 2：Peer Review & Editing

1.Review Policy: The journal adopts single blind review method. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript. The editorial office will reject the manuscripts which are insufficient in originality, having serious scientific or technical mistakes, lacking valuable information, or not in the scope of the journal. Manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be anonymously sent to two peer reviewers. The authors must respond to the reviewers' every comment and submit the revised version in time. This process would be repeated until the reviewers and editors are satisfied with the manuscript. 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 the 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, which will not change the original meaning. If the authors disagree with the amendments, please make a statement when returning the revised manuscript.
3.Timing: The journal will notify the author once the manuscript is accepted. If you have not received the processing result after 3 months of submission, it means that the manuscript is still being processed; if you want to submit to another journal, please contact the editorial department first for withdrawal. If authors do not return the revised manuscript 3 months after receiving reviews’ comments, the manuscript will be regarded as being withdrawn.
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 of the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to xsdbjb@188.com. 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 office will consider whether to change the decision case by case.

Section 3：Correction & 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: Copyright & Archive

1.OA Policy: Water Saving Irrigation is an open access journal. Once published, all articles will be immediately and permanently available for readers to read and download free of charge. Permitted third party reuse of the articles published by the journal is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND). 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. The 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 Transfer: The authors are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement and transfer all copyright of the article and its figures, tables, abstract and extract to the editorial office of Water Saving Irrigation, including but not limited to the right of reproduction, distribution, online dissemination, performance, translation, compilation and adaption, etc. 

3.Archive: Since 2017, all journal articles have been digitally archived and 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. Before 2017, the　hard and soft copy of each issue of the journal had been kept in the editorial office for archiving. In addition, other relevant materials are also kept by the editorial office, such as supplementary information and forms provided by the authors. The full text of articles published in this journal can also be downloaded from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang Data, Weipu, Chaoxing, etc. In case the journal and the website were closed, archiving data could be retrieved through those full-text databases. 
Authors have right to upload the article to author's personal webpage, and to post or update the article on an e-print (publication) server.

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. The journal also encourages the sharing of software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials. The authors can upload the materials above to an accessible third-party repository and make a proper citation or add a link at the end of the article.

Section 5: Advertisement Policy
　　Water Saving Irrigation welcomes advertising from companies in the industry . The advertisement will be posted in the print journal. Our advertising policy is as followed.

(1)The publishing of all advertisements will be collectively discussed and determined on our editorial meetings. 
(2)Advertisements published in the journals must comply with the Advertising Law of The People’s Republic of China and relevant laws and regulations. The journal will not publish advertisements not meeting the provision of relevant laws and regulations, or not in the scope of the journal. 
(3)The journal could make reasonable amendments to advertisements, but will obtain the consent of advertisers in advance. 
(4)The commercial content will be completely separated from academic content. Advertising will not affect editors' decision to accept manuscripts. 
(5)In case of potential conflicts of interest, authors, editors and reviewers will disclose the information in accordance with guidelines of COPE, ICMJE and relevant international.