The following terms govern matters relating to external indexing services, publication charges, and refund requests. Authors are encouraged to review these provisions before submission and payment.

External Indexing Services

The journal may be listed, abstracted, or indexed by independent bibliographic and citation databases, including services such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and other third-party indexing platforms.

All decisions concerning the evaluation, acceptance, continuation, suspension, removal, coverage period, and processing of journal content within such databases are made independently by the respective indexing organizations.

The publisher does not participate in or control the internal policies, review procedures, database processing schedules, or coverage decisions of external indexing agencies.

As a result, the journal cannot provide any assurance that:

• its indexing status will remain unchanged indefinitely;

• every published article will appear in a particular database;

• an article will be indexed within a specific period; or

• previously indexed content will continue to remain covered by an indexing service.

Authors who require publication in a particular indexing database for academic, institutional, promotion, funding, or regulatory purposes should independently verify the journal’s current status directly with the relevant indexing organization before proceeding.

Publication Charges

Any Article Processing Charge (APC), publication charge, or related publishing fee collected by the journal is charged for services associated with manuscript processing and publication.

These services may include editorial assessment, administration of peer review, communication with reviewers and authors, manuscript preparation, language or copyediting where applicable, formatting, typesetting, production, online hosting, and final publication on the journal website.

Publication charges are not fees paid for indexing and do not create any obligation upon the publisher to secure or maintain coverage in a third-party database.

Refund Conditions

Where an article has successfully completed editorial processing and peer review, has been formally accepted, and has subsequently been published on the official journal platform, the publication fee shall be considered fully utilized toward the publishing services provided.

Accordingly, fees paid for an article that has already been published are non-refundable.

A refund shall not become due merely because an external database later changes the indexing or coverage status of the journal.

Changes in Indexing Status

Indexing agencies reserve the right to modify their journal lists and coverage policies at their own discretion.

If the journal is removed, discontinued, suspended, excluded, or otherwise ceases to be covered by Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, or another external indexing service, the publisher shall not be liable for any resulting absence or change in database coverage.

No refund, cancellation, reimbursement, compensation, or financial claim shall be accepted solely on the basis of such third-party indexing changes, regardless of whether the change takes place before or after the article appears online.

Acceptance of Terms

Submission of a manuscript and/or payment of the applicable publication fee constitutes acknowledgment that the author has reviewed and accepted these terms concerning third-party indexing and refund eligibility.