Introduction 

Conflict-of-Interest

Conflict of interest can be either financial or non-financial. Authors submitting to USP journals are required to declare if they have any conflict of interest which may result in the data written in their article to be influenced by any personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations.

Financial Conflict of Interest include (but not limited to):

• Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the article, either now or in the future.
• Holding stocks or shares in an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the article, either now or in the future.
• Holding, or currently applying for, patents relating to the content of the manuscript.
• Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.

Non-Financial Conflict of Interest include (but not limited to):

• political
• personal
• religious
• ideological
• academic
• intellectual competing interests

A declaration of interests for all authors must be received before an article can be reviewed and accepted for publication. 

Language

All articles should be written in English—either British or American as long as consistency is observed. SI units should be used. If you are not a native speaker of English you may want to utilize the professional language editing service provided by us before submitting the final version.

Plagiarism

USP does not approve any form of plagiarism used in submitted manuscript. All manuscripts submitted to USP journals will be checked for plagiarism by our managing editor before being passed to the Editor-in-Chief. Any manuscripts found to be in violation of plagiarism will be rejected by our managing editor.

Publication Ethics

USP requires all members involved in the journal publishing process to adhere to the principles of Core practices as stipulated by COPE (Committee on Publishing Ethics), to investigate misconduct and to ensure the integrity of research. COPE has defined measures against data fabrication, duplicate publication, plagiarism and retraction, etc. All complaints submitted by the authors to the journal will be addressed promptly according to the procedure set out in the COPE complaints and appeals. The complainant may direct all inquiries and correspondence to the publisher at contact@usp-pl.com.

The journal editors take all possible misconducts seriously. The Editors, authors or readers can forward their concerns to the journal if they find out that the description in a submitted article may constitute an academic fraud, research misconduct or publication malpractice. The concerns or complaints on the possible allegations submitted to the journal will be dealt with promptly and appropriately according to the procedure set out in the COPE flowchart on complaints and in PERK. The complainant may direct all inquiries and correspondence to the Publisher at contact@usp-pl.com.

Authorship

List those that have made significant contribution to the reported study as co-authors, and for others who have participated in certain aspects to be listed or acknowledged as contributors in their study. The corresponding author has to ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper, and agree to its submission for publication.

Article Processing Charge (APC)

Like most other gold open-access journals, USP journals maintains our high quality of service through an 'author-pay' model. The scientific community and the general public have, for free, unlimited and immediate access to all content published in our journals as soon as it is published on the Internet. As such, manuscripts that are accepted for publication following peer review may incur an article processing charge (APC). Payment of this charge allows Universe Scientific Publishing to offset peer review management, journal production and online hosting and archiving. In addition, overall publication charges also will be used to provide fee waivers for authors from lesser developed countries (see below).

Universe Scientific Publishing is committed to keeping its open access publication charges at a minimum level. There are no hidden costs at our journals. There is no additional charge for colour figures. Published articles appear electronically and are freely available from our website. Authors may also use their published articles for any non-commercial use on their personal or non-commercial institution's website.

The exact value of article processing charges for each journal is given in the table below. The APC covers editorial services and production of an article. Upon acceptance for publication a processing fee will be payable. Owing to fluctuations in foreign exchange rates fees may occasionally be subject to change without notice.

Focus and Scope

Advances in Higher Education is a fully accessible publication that serves as the medium to publish the original educational research article that focusing on teaching, learning and educational developments throughout the world in universities, polytechnics, colleges, and vocational and education institutions which despite public and private higher education sectors. It aims to serve as a debate forum for a diverse group of scholar who share the characteristic features, as well as problems and issue of each education system, and who can have significant voice in discussion around topics of higher education. The content will focus on the field of educational theory, student management, teaching method, conceptual model of educational process and cases study.

The article categories within the journal include (but are not limited to) the following fields:

• Critical Thinking
• Learning Theory and Processes
• Theory Practice Relationship
• Teacher Education
• Curriculum
• Recruitment
• Campus Climate
• Academic Culture
• Languages
• Persistence motivations

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to USP journals undergo a rigorous peer review process, in which most of our peer reviews are single blind (unless stated otherwise).

All submitted manuscript are firstly handled by our managing editor, who will check the manuscript for plagiarism, in which rejection of the manuscript can take place at this stage by the managing editor if plagiarism occurs in the manuscript.

After the plagiarism check is completed and results are deemed satisfactory, the managing editor will pass the manuscript to the Editor-in-Chief who will undertake the peer review process, or at times pass the task to one of the Associate Editor.

A minimum of 2 reviewers will be selected from the pool of reviewers available according to their expertise and suitability to the subject matter of the manuscript. Reviewers will have to give their comments and recommendations (Accept, Major Revisions, Reject) to the Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editor for them to make a final decision on the paper, and their comments will help the authors improve their papers.

Upon recommendations by the reviewers, the Editor-in-Chief or the Associate Editor can make a final decision on the paper and inform the author on their decision, adding comments to the Authors to make improvements in their research or paper.

Typically there are 3 main decisions in the peer review process – Accept, Major Revisions or Reject. If the Editor-in-Chief accepts the paper, it could be split into Minor revisions (author to make minor amendments to the paper) or No revisions (no amendments required by author), after which the paper can be sent to the Editing stage.

If the decision is a Major Revision, the authors are required to make the changes as suggested in the comments accordingly and the paper will be resubmitted for a second (or third) round of review. If the decision is to Reject the manuscript, the author will be notified and the rejected manuscript will be archived and the peer review process ends.

An accepted paper will be sent for Copy Editing, Layout Editing and Proofreading before publication of the paper. Correspondence between the authors and USP will be required here in order to improve the language and/or look of the manuscript. After the Editing stage is completed, authors are required to check the PDF file of the final version before the article is published. USP registers DOI for the manuscript before publishing it on our site, in which the article is immediately accessible to the public.

Open Access Policy

Advances in Higher Education provides immediate Gold Open Access to its content as it believes that making research freely available to the public helps promote the research results and in turn benefits the scholarly community.

• Higher Visibility, Availability and Citations – free and unlimited accessibility of the publication over the internet without any restrictions increases citation of the article
• Ease of search – publications are easily searchable in search engines and indexing databases
• Rapid Publication – accepted papers are immediately published online

All published content is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium under the condition that the original work is properly cited.

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