Authors Instruction for Water Saving Irrigation
Section 1: Publishing Scope
Section 2: Requirement for Manuscript
Section 3: Ethics
Section 4: Peer Review and Editing
Section 5: Correction and Retraction
Section 6: Open Access, Copyright and Archive
Section 7: Fees
Section 8: Method of Submission
Section 1: Publishing Scope
Water Saving Irrigation is a national academic monthly journal, jointly sponsored by China Irrigation and Drainage Development Center and Wuhan University. The publishing scope includes: theory and technology for water-saving irrigation, experimental research on water-saving irrigation, irrigation and agricultural water-soil resources, agrometeorology, basic theory on water-saving irrigation, economics of water-saving irrigation, project management, technical lectures, international trends, equipment and market, newsletters and other contents related to water-saving irrigation.
Section 2: Requirement for Manuscript
Manuscripts shall be innovative, scientific and readable, and shall comply with specifications and standards in terms of physical quantities, legal units of measurement, figures, tables and formats. Review articles should have the author's unique perspective and viewpoint. The manuscripts should include following parts with fixed order: Title, Authors’ Names, Institute, City, Postal Code, Chinese Abstract, Keywords; English Title (Consistent With Chinese), Authors’ names in English, Institute in English, City name in English, Postal Code, English Abstract, English Keywords; Text (Footer in Title-page, introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Analysis, Discussion, Conclusion, Acknowledgement, References). The Footer in Title-page should include: date of submission, funding project, author information and the corresponding author. The journal has detailed guidelines on each part of the manuscript. Before submitting, the authors should carefully read Requirement for Manuscript, Requirement for Figures and References and Manuscript Format Template at the download center of this website, and draft and revise your manuscript accordingly.
Section 3：Ethics
1. Plagiarism: All manuscripts would be tested by the plagiarism checking system developed by CNKI. 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.
Section 4：Peer Review & Editing
1. Review Policy: 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 the review result has not been received more than ___ months after submission, it can be regarded as being rejected. The journal will not issue notice for such cases. The authors can re-submit the manuscript to another journal after confirming with the editorial office. 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.
Section 5：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 6: 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 the copyright of the article to the editorial office of Water Saving Irrigation, which includes compilation (whole or part of the article), translation, reproduction of hard or soft copies, online dissemination, and issuing.
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.
Section 7: Fees
Once the manuscript publishing is confirmed, an APC shall be payable (RMB 3000 per article; RMB 1000 for urgent processing). The editorial office will remunerate the authors with a one-off payment and two copy of the current issue of the journal.
Section 8: Method of Submission
The journal adopts online submission system. Please visit http://www.irrigate.com.cn/jsgg/CN/1007-4929/home.shtml , carefully read the instructions and policies before register for submission. Once the manuscript is submitted, the supplementary documents listed below should be provided.
1) Copyright Transfer Agreement
2) Authors Contribution Form
3) Statement of Competing Interests