REVIEW POLICY

All papers are single-blind peer reviewed. Each paper is assigned to at least three reviewers. At least two favorable reviews out of three are required for a paper to be considered for publication. The reviewers evaluate the papers according to the following criteria:

Quality

Does the paper reflect excellence of research work? Is it technically sound?

Originality

Does the paper provide a novel approach? Does it discuss new/unpublished work? Does it contain significant additional material to that already published?

Clarity

Does the paper clearly communicate its message? Are tables and graphics clear to read and labelled appropriately?

Relevance

How well does the content fit the Journal’s objectives and the issue’s theme? Is the paper of interest to the readership of the Journal?

References

Does the paper contain the appropriate referencing to provide adequate context for the present work?

Summary of evaluation

What is the global evaluation for this paper?

Overall recommendation

Is the overall recommendation for this paper to 'accept' (with minor or major revisions) or to 'reject'?

Reviewer familiarity

Reviewers are assigned based on their familiarity with topic of the paper.

Plagiarism

All papers submitted for review are also scanned for plagiarism. Those papers where plagiarism is detected will not be considered for publication.

PUBLICATION RIGHTS AND COPYRIGHT

Open access statement and copyright

This publication is a peer reviewed, open access journal published with no author’s fees. All articles included in the ITU Journal are copyrighted to the ITU and TUP, and available for free on the ITU website as well as in the Tsinghua University Press online catalogue.

Upon acceptance of a paper, authors will be asked to complete and return via email a copyright transfer form duly signed.

Licensing statement and reproduction rights

Under the user license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO), users may copy and distribute journal articles in any format. The user may do so provided appropriate credit is given, this includes but is not limited to, providing the name of the author and a link to the original published material. The user may not copy or distribute the publication for commercial use nor may the user distribute a version of the publication that has been remixed, transformed or built upon. The complete license is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/. 

Commercial use

Requests for commercial use and licensing beyond the terms of the Creative Commons license should be addressed to TUP (Floor 6, Tower B, Xueyan Building, Shuangqing Road, Haidian District, Beijing, P.R. China, journal@tsinghua.edu.cn). 

Third-party materials

If the user wishes to reuse material from the published articles that is attributed to a third party, such as tables, figures or images, it is the user's responsibility to determine whether permission is needed for that reuse and to obtain permission from the copyright holder. The risk of claims resulting from infringement of any third-party-owned component in the work rests solely with the user.

General disclaimers

The designations employed and the presentation of the material in the published articles do not imply the expr‍ession of any opinion whatsoever on the part of ITU or TUP concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The mention of specific companies or of certain manufacturers’ products does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by ITU or TUP in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned.

ETHICS STATEMENT

The Journal on Intelligent and Converged Networks is a joint publication between the International Telecommunication Union and Tsinghua University Press. Both entities support the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), following and referring to the COPE guidelines within the ethics practices of this scholarly publication.

Authorship and attribution

All papers submitted to the Journal should list the names of every author, who made a significant contribution towards the research and the presentation of the academic paper. All such contributors are to be listed as authors and co-authors, in a manner determined and decided by the authors. Any changes to the list and its order should be communicated to the Journal editorial team.
The practice of adopting “gift authors', who are individuals listed as authors despite making no significant contribution to the research, and “ghost authors', who have contributed to the research but are not listed as co-authors, is not permitted. Where an issue of authorship, including ghost and gift authors, is suspected, these matters will be handled accordingly by the Editorial team. 
All other contributors providing some assistance and support, but not deemed significant for the purposes of authorship, should be listed in the Acknowledgments section of the research paper.

Redundant publications and plagiarism

Authors are to submit original research for publication; this requires that there be no previous or concurrent publication of the same article and its findings. As such, an author may not submit his or her research to multiple journals at the same time, and instead should wait for the final decision on the paper before submitting the research to another journal. Where an author is found to have made simultaneous submissions, the paper will be automatically rejected. The author’s institution will be notified and the author will be barred from submitting papers to this journal as well to future ITU publications and TUP publications.
Authors may use works of their own that have been published previously, provided the previous article is properly cited, and differs in some way from the current study.
Authors should gain the appropriate permission prior to publication where the research paper incorporates various figures, tables and images.

Conflict of interest

This research publication relies on being an unbiased and fair resource for academic research. To this end, all contributors, authors, editors and reviewers are to disclose any potential conflict of interest that might hinder an honest and effective review and publication.
A conflict of interest may be deemed to exist where a party is unduly influenced to take action, or refrain from taking action, concerning the research, based on a personal or financial interest. A party unduly influenced may, for example, try to manipulate the research to produce a certain result, to ensure that the research receives a negative review and therefore is not published, or provide a positive review where it is not reasonable to do so.  
For the author, conflicts of interest are to be disclosed when the paper is submitted to the Journal, stating fully the personal, institutional and financial interests and support which might influence the research. This will be taken into account by the editorial team. A reviewer assigned to a paper should disclose any personal, financial or intellectual interests that would render him or her unable to fulfil his or her duties fairly and without undue influence. In this case, the editor will select an alternative reviewer for that paper.

Peer review and fair editing

This publication follows a single-blind review process, as stipulated in the Journal’s review policy, with reviewers carefully selected based on their expertise in the research field. Reviewers play an essential part in the publication of academic research and therefore should conduct their review as timely as possible, while using respectful and academic language in their reviews and comments, providing reasons for their statements as well as refraining from personal attacks against authors.
Fair editing and review require that manuscripts be evaluated based on their contribution to the science, and without regard to personal differences. Where a reviewer has been assigned to a manuscript, but is unable to fulfil this obligation for any reason, the reviewer is required to notify the Journal editorial team.
While reviewers may offer ideas and suggest a certain direction within the research, reviewers may not require an author to cite or refer to a certain publication as a condition for paper acceptance and thereby, publication.
Reviewers owe a duty of confidentiality in respect to the manuscripts they are assigned. They may not communicate their review comments to parties other than the Journal editorial team. Reviewers are prohibited from using the manuscripts, and their findings, for their own personal use and research, without consulting with the relevant authors. Where a reviewer is found to have appropriated an author’s work, he or she thereby breaches the duty of confidentiality.

Falsified data and manipulated images

With the widespread use of images to display scientific research data, authors should ensure that such images are not distorted from the original. It is generally not permitted to change, add or remove elements from an image, nor to obscure these elements. Minor adjustments are accepted where they are made to allow for better visibility. In this case, the Journal editorial team should be made aware of the changes, or they should be expressly noted in the paper itself.

Complaints and concerns

Where any of the ethical principles described above are disregarded, or are suspected to have been, complaints should be directed to TUP (Floor 6, Tower B, Xueyan Building, Shuangqing Road, Haidian District, Beijing, P.R. China, journal@tsinghua.edu.cn).