Information for Contributors

Special Announcement for Covid-19 Pandemic:

As our funding, editorial and technical support have been severely limited by the pandemic in 2020, only very high quality manuscripts will be considered for publication in the coming issues. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused.

1. Submission. Articles should be sent to the Chief Editor, APFSLT Editorial Board (c/o Science and Environmental Studies Department, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, HONG KONG, CHINA; Phone: 852-29487650; Fax: 852-29487676, Email: apfslt@eduhk.hk) in MS-Word format by (a) post, (b) email (for file size less than 5 MB) or (c) online submission at http://has.eduhk.hk/apfslt/.
 
2. Language.  Manuscripts can be in English or Chinese. Every Chinese article must be accompanied with an English abstract.

3. Originality. It is assumed that all kinds of contribution and embedded multimedia materials are submitted for consideration with the understanding that they are original and have not been published, simultaneously submitted for publication or offered for publication elsewhere. The corresponding author needs to confirm this point before we could process the submission.

4. Review. After the preliminary review by our Editorial Board, suitable manuscripts will be sent out to undergo the normal peer-reviewing process which will normally last for 2 to 6 months, depending on the availability of referees and their willingness to review the article. If we could not identify suitable referees or the referees decline to review a particular manuscript (most likely due to its narrow scope of interest in the science education community or many problematic issues found in its quality), the authors should (or will be asked to) withdraw the manuscript for submission to another more appropriate journal. In the last few years, we have rejected around a half of the submission during the preliminary review stage and less than 10% of the articles could be finally accepted without major or minor revision. This journal is definitely not established for fast and easy publication.

4. Typing.  Manuscripts should be given in either the HTML format or the MS-Word format of which the latter should follow the specifications given below:

5. Style.  American Psychological Association (APA Publication Manual 6th. ed., 2010), including use of three levels of headings, citations, and references.  Footnotes should be avoided and replaced by hyperlinks.

6. Length.  There is no restriction in number of words. Normally it should be around 3,000 to 6,000. Software and hardware reviews should be less than 2,000 words;

7. Abstract.  An abstract of around 200-500 words should be provided. Articles written in Chinese must also include an English version of the abstract together with a translated title.

8. Copyrights.  Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission to reproduce any copyrighted materials in the manuscripts. The copyrights of all published articles in this journal belong to the publisher who reserves the rights to re-publish them in the printed or CD-ROM (or any other possible) version.

9. Revision. The editors reserve the rights to edit manuscripts and embedded multimedia materials.

10. Ethics. Authors need to follow the usual ethical practices as commonly adopted in the science education community. There must be no malpractice nor plagiarism found in any part of the manuscript.
 
11. Proofs. Proofs will be sent to the authors if there is sufficient time to do so. They should be corrected and returned to the Chief Editor within three working days. Once released for open access, there will be no more article retraction or correction unless there are malpractice or plagiarism reported.

12. Archive. In the very unlikely event that the journal should no longer be published, all published articles will be archived in a server of the Education University of Hong Kong, and/or other reliable servers in the public domain for open access.

13. No publication charge. In order to maintain the highest academic standards and integrity, we do not charge nor ask for any publication fee nor article processing charge. Our publication decision will be solely based on the reviewers' comments and the academic merits of the articles concerned.
   

Deadline for Submission:

  • Issue One of each New Volume: 30 April. 
  • Issue Two of each New Volume: 31 October.

Editorial Board

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching

APFSLT The Education University of Hong Kong
10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, N.T. Hong Kong
Phone: 852-2948 7650 Fax: 852-2948 7676
E-mail: apfslt@sci.eduhk.hk Website: http://www.eduhk.hk/apfslt
Copyright (C) 2000-2021 EdUHK APFSLT. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 1609-4913.