Fees & funding
Fees must be transparent, post-review and never confused with acceptance.
The journal charges no submission fee. A fixed prospective, post-acceptance fee schedule is published below; inaugural-issue waivers and the server-readiness-gated preliminary intake are distinguished clearly from future chargeable publication.
Founding issue commitment
The inaugural issue is fee-waived. This allows the journal to establish editorial standards, recruit strong work and demonstrate that acceptance is determined by scholarship rather than payment.
Payment timing
If an APC is introduced later, payment should be requested only after editorial acceptance. DOI registration will not be sold as an optional add-on; every eligible published research article will receive the same identifier policy.
Payment records
The production platform will retain invoice number, manuscript ID, payer, amount, currency, payment status, waiver status, transaction reference and reconciliation date. Card or banking credentials will never be stored in the journal database.
Access model and founding safeguards
The founding editorial policy proposes free access for readers and no fee for manuscript submission. The inaugural issue is intended to be fee-waived while the journal establishes its review and production systems. This principle aims to separate scholarly judgement from the financial position of an author and to make the first publishing decisions accountable to editorial quality.
The prospective post-founding article-processing rates are set out below, together with waivers, tax disclosure and refund rules; no charge applies until the lawful publishing workflow is activated. Payments must never influence peer-review assignment, handling-editor decisions or the speed of acceptance. A valid DOI, where assigned through an authorised legal registration route, is not an optional paid marker of academic prestige.
Licensing and copyright
Before the first article is released, authors will be given explicit information on the retention or transfer of rights, open-access licensing, reuse permissions and third-party content. The journal's intended access model should remain compatible with transparent, non-exclusive scholarly dissemination; detailed licence choices will be publicly approved before manuscript intake is opened.
Current reality: no formal manuscript-submission or article-processing payment is being accepted for JHELA. The journal's submission process remains in preparation.
Open access is a rights policy, not simply free reading
JHELA's founding intention is immediate, free access to its scholarly articles when genuine publication begins. To qualify as open access under internationally recognised standards, the journal must also disclose the rights allowing reading, reuse, distribution and computational analysis, and explain whether authors retain copyright. The specific licence—such as an appropriately selected Creative Commons licence—remains subject to explicit publisher and editorial approval. No definitive reuse licence is claimed for articles that do not yet exist.
Repository deposit and long-term availability
The proposed publication agreement should allow authors to deposit preprints, accepted manuscripts and the version of record in appropriate institutional or disciplinary repositories without a contradictory embargo, with due acknowledgement of the authoritative published version where available. A documented preservation arrangement and permanent article URLs are prerequisites of the operational journal, not services already certified in the founding phase.
The journal will not claim a DOAJ listing or compliance certification in advance. Its prospective policy is informed by the DOAJ Guide to Applying, which distinguishes free-to-read material from fully licensed open-access content.
2026–2027 prospective rate card · Not collecting payments
Fixed fees for manuscripts submitted after formal APC activation
JHELA adopts a transparent prospective fee schedule benchmarked to established international open-access publishing, while recognising that its own founding-stage services and institutional standing are not equivalent to those of mature publishers. These amounts are not currently payable; secure preliminary manuscript intake is subject to live host verification, while formal peer review and invoicing remain unavailable until their independent launch controls pass. The applicable rate will be disclosed and confirmed before a manuscript enters any future chargeable submission process, and will not be increased retrospectively for that manuscript.
Founding-issue and equity waivers
The first published issue carries a 100% publication-fee waiver for all accepted eligible articles. Once paid submissions are formally authorised, full waivers will be available for qualifying corresponding authors based in World Bank low-income economies; documented severe financial hardship may be considered for partial or full waivers by a designated finance officer, independent of editorial selection. Authors should request an assessment before submission; the editorial decision-maker must not see financial eligibility or the waiver result. No country-based restriction on scholarship is inferred from the journal's ability to collect lawful payments.
What an APC must include
A post-acceptance APC, when activated, will cover ordinary editorial administration, independent review management, copyediting, accessible PDF and web production, metadata preparation, long-term digital preservation contributions and ordinary hosting; there will be no additional charges for a DOI, colour figure or standard page length. Services must actually be demonstrable before billing. Taxes, if legally applicable, will be identified on the invoice. No invoice will issue on rejection, withdrawal before acceptance, or without a recorded author agreement.
Refund, payment independence and cancellation
Payments will be requested only after an independently documented acceptance decision and an itemised invoice, through a legally available and verified payment channel. Duplicate or erroneous charges are refundable; where publication cannot be completed due to the publisher's failure, a full APC refund will be provided. After publication, any exceptional refund request will receive an individually documented outcome; corrective notices or retractions must never be prevented by non-payment. Reviewer remuneration, preferential review speed or guaranteed acceptance cannot be purchased. The publisher will maintain a separated finance ledger and publish any sponsorship or institutional funding without giving financial supporters editorial control.
Benchmark sources (accessed 16 October 2026): Education Sciences (CHF 2,000), Frontiers publishing-fee categories, and DOAJ transparency principles. These comparators inform pricing; JHELA does not claim their rankings, infrastructure, memberships or services.