General Policies
In the journal publishing practice, we follow the
Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors;
Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers;
and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

Access to Publications
All the articles published at LA Frontiers are freely accessible in full text at this website worldwide.

Publication Fees
For now, authors are free of any charge for submission and publication to LA Frontiers.

Peer Review Policy
All the articles to be published to LA Frontiers have gone through scrutiny from the editorial board and careful editing by the editorial team.
Peer review mechanism has been in place at LA Frontiers. Each submission will be reviewed first in the editorial office for the primary check, and then the eligible ones will be sent for peer review. LA Frontiers invites professionals in the related fields to conduct the peer review and adopts double-blind reviews—each submission is reviewed by at least two reviewers. The reviewers are expected to respond promptly to requests for review and to submit review reports within the time agreed. More reviewers will be invited if there is a split opinion. The whole review process takes no longer than three months. If revisions are needed, we allow authors to revise their manuscripts for further consideration.

Transparency Policies
Higher Education Press is a responsible, ethical publisher with a commitment to transparency in publishing. LA Frontiers now has certain principles established as related to publishing ethics in AECHITECTURE and allied fields, and will keep improving as our awareness for ethical publishing grows.

Conflicts of Interest
During manuscript submission, the authors are required to disclose the nature of any competing and/or relevant financial interest. They should report all potential sources of bias, including affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships that may constitute conflicts of interest.

Copyright and Licensing
The authors of all the approved articles are required to sign the Article Copyright Statement to assign Higher Education Press their copyrights, or to give Higher Education Press the exclusive or non-exclusive license to publish their articles and to reauthorize to publish.
As LA Frontiers contains a large amount of graphic presentations (e.g., figures, images, photos), we require the authors to guarantee that all graphic materials they used for the publication are authorized and do not involve any copyright affairs.

Plagiarism Detection
LA Frontiers employs the professional tool developed by CNKI, China’s top scholarly aggregator, to screen submitted manuscripts for similarity to published material. Plagiarism is strictly rejected.

Allegations of Misconduct
LA Frontiers values research integrity and appreciates that research should be fair and conducted in an objective and comprehensive manner concerning the rights of all parties involved, so that to avoid or mitigate potential risks.
Concerns raised about any manuscript will be promptly and transparently addressed by the journal editors and the publisher. Communication and investigations about the allegations will be openly conducted. LA Frontiers consider retracting an article if there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable because of falsification, fabrication, plagiarism or major error, or are unethical. The form of the retraction is clearly and readily identifiable, freely available to all readers, published promptly, state who is retracting the article and the reasons for the retraction in objective and factual language.

Appeals and Complaints
The authors can contact the editorial team via lafrontiers@foxmail.com if they would like to express disagreement with the decisions about their submissions, or to report a failure in process (such as a long delay), or to fire a complaint on anything within the responsibility of the editorial team. The complaints will be acknowledged timely and politely, and the complaint will be reported to the supervisors if necessary.

Revenue Sources
Organizational support

Advertising Policy
LA Frontiers now accepts such non-commercial advertisements as important article introduction, conferences and meetings, call for papers, and scholarship and fellowship enrollments.

Archiving Policy

The official published version of all the articles will be archived on Frontiers Journals website.

Data Repository

The paper-related data encourage to be submitted and shared in a data repository. Our selection criteria and recommended list of data repositories are as follows:

A.    Selection criteria: The data repository shall follow the FAIR principle to ensure the discoverability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scientific data. Specifically, it includes the following contents and requirements:

Ø  The data repository shall provide discoverable data identifiers for scientific data.

Ø  When data is stored in the repository, links and publicly shared permanent access addresses should be provided for the editorial department and reviewers to review.

Ø  Metadata and files should support interoperability and provide an open metadata harvesting interface.

Ø  The data repository should support the reuse of data, provide a common standard metadata and dissemination distribution path, and provide support for data reuse.

B.     Recommendation List

Ø  Science Data Bank (ScienceDB) (https://www.scidb.cn/c/nb).