Focus and Scope

Urban Transportation & Construction is a fully peer-reviewed international open-access journal, which contains research papers, review articles and case studies associated with various forms of public transportation, urban architecture, urban planning and related policy issues. The journal aims at establishing a bridge between theory and practice in the related fields, and promote rapid communication and exchange among scholars, architects, engineers and administrators.

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

• Transportation Engineering/Planning
• Air Transportation
• Marine and Water Transportation
• Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)
• Transport modeling and simulation
• Transport Safety and Security
• Logistics
• Urban Planning and Development
• Urban Management, Economics and Policy
• Urban Infrastructure
• Construction & Energy
• Architectural and Design Research
• Landscape Architecture
• Built Environment
• Disaster Management
• Information Science

Section Policies

Original Article

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Review Article

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Construction Practice

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

All papers submitted to Journal of Urban Transportation & Construction are subjected to a stringent peer review process. This is to uphold the high quality of papers published in UTC and ensure that the reporting of research work is truthful and accurate.

Upon submission, the article is reviewed by UTC in-house editors to assess its suitability for the journal based on the editorial policy and procedural guidelines.
The Editor-in-Chief (EIC) carefully evaluates each manuscript to determine if its topic and content are suitable for consideration.
The accepted manuscripts are then assigned by the EIC to the associate editors according to their respective areas of expertise.
The associate editor selects reviewers from the editorial board or external reviewers who are suitably qualified to assess the paper.
Reviewers are asked to evaluate the manuscript’s originality, methodology, contribution to the literature, presentation of results and support for the conclusions, and appropriate referencing of previous relevant studies
Post-evaluation by the reviewers, the manuscript is sent to the associate editor who makes one of the following recommendations: accept, accept with minor revision, or reject.
The manuscript is then passed to the EIC who makes the final decision.
If EIC suggests minor revisions, authors are given a maximum of 30 days to revise and resubmit the article.
If EIC suggests major revisions, authors are given a maximum of 90 days to revise and resubmit the article.
After re-submission of the revised manuscript, the above steps are repeated before the paper is accepted for publication.
Authors of rejected submissions are advised to make an appeal in writing to editorial-utc@usp-pl.com
Written appeals should include specific reasons for the appeal and point-by-point response to the reviewers' suggestions and criticisms.
Decisions made on appeals by the EIC are final and no further considerations will be made.

Open Access Policy

This journal 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.

Conflict-of-Interest

Conflicts of interest may exist when professional judgements concerning a primary interest have the possibility of being influenced by a secondary interest (e.g.: financial gains). It is to be noted that even perceptions of conflicts of interest are as important as the actual conflicts of interest.

Any agreements with study sponsors (for profit or non-profit), which interfere with the authors’ access to the study data, ability to analyze or interpret the data and publish manuscripts independently according to their own decision, should be avoided by authors at all costs.

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

Language

The language used in manuscripts submitted to Journal of Urban Transportation & Construction is English. Authors whose first language is not English may want to have their manuscripts professionally edited before the final submission to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by its prospective readers.

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.