Open Access

Software Guide is an open access journal and all articles will be available for free reading and downloading immediately and permanently upon publication.

User Rights

        For all open access articles of this journal, permitted third party reuse of the articles published by the journal is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows reusers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms below are followed: reusers must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Reusers may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the use. Reusers may not use the material for commercial purposes. If reusers remix, transform, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material. The full details of the license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Copyright

       All authors should sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement. Authors agree to transfer the copyright of the paper it owns to Editorial Office of Software Guide, including but not limited to following rights: (1) Compilation (in full or in part); (2) Translation; (3) Reproduction of print and electronic versions; (4) Online dissemination; (5) Distribution. The Editorial Office has right to make online first digital publication of this paper on this journal’s website and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (www.cnki.net) before its print edition. Authors may use the paper under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License and may include (or translate) some of the paper content in its subsequent works or compile it in authors’ non-journal collections.

Peer Review

Software Guide has a peer-review (double-blind review) mechanism under the leadership of the editorial board. The process is as follows: First, all submissions must pass the China Knowledge Network Academic Misconduct Detection, and manuscripts with a duplication rate of more than 20% will be returned directly. Secondly, manuscripts that have passed the academic misconduct test will be initially evaluated by the editors to see if they are suitable for publication in the journal. Again, suitable manuscripts will be submitted to at least two experts in the field for review to assess their scientific quality. Finally, the editor-in-chief is responsible for the acceptance or rejection of the article.

Article Archiving Policy

       Since 2009, all articles published in the Journal are open access articles under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which are archived immediately after publication and permanently on the journal's official website for free access by all users, and can be searched and downloaded from the journal's website. Before 2024, all journal articles have been digitally archived, and readers can obtain past articles from CNKI, Wanfang Data and other platforms.

Self-archiving Policy

       The journal allows authors to store all versions of their articles in an institutional or other knowledge repository of the authors' choice, subject to the specification of journal publication information in the article metadata of the stored institutional or other knowledge repository, and as a recommended citation.

Publication costs

To support open access publishing, Software Guide charges an open access fee (also known as article publication charge, APC), which is paid by the authors or their institutions or research funders. The standard is RMB 200/thousand characters (counting spaces), and charts and formulas are charged separately; the first author enjoys 15% discount if he/she is a member of CCF. Manuscript review fee is RMB 200/article.