Fees & funding
Fees must be transparent, post-review and never confused with acceptance.
The journal will not charge a submission fee. Any future Article Processing Charge (APC), waiver, institutional payment arrangement or founding-issue exemption will be stated publicly before submissions open.
Founding recommendation
The founding issue should be 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.
Should article-processing charges be considered later, the journal must disclose the exact amount, currency, any taxes, waiver eligibility, refund conditions and timing before accepting submissions. 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.