this site

2010 - 2014

this site is an independent publisher established in January 2010 and has its headquarters in Hong Kong. Initially, we positioned ourselves as a social enterprise and adopt the open access model - requesting publication fees from authors rather than requiring subscription fees from institutes so that all works published by us are downloadable for free. Our goal is to help academics make their works visible and accessible to the diverse new audiences around the world:

• Financial Fairness. We believe everyone should have access knowledge, regardless of monetary status. It is unfortunate, however, that many scientists in poor countries are unable to afford them. In light of this, we use the open access model. Because the company cannot survive without income, authors are billed a certain amount for article processing. However, this fee is waived if one or more authors of a paper are from low-income countries.
• Wide Distribution Channel. All our books and lecture notes are distributed through a number of online bookstores such as Amazon.com.
• High Quality. A peer review system is set in place to ensure the quality of all the articles included in our books and journals. Typesetting each article is done with the utmost care.
• Internationalism and Open Access. Our books and journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (i.e., an open access license) that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and credited.

2015 - Now

Starting from 2015, a new publication track called "Lecture Notes" is launched, so as to separate with the name of our existing collections. Lecture notes are similar to books but focusing on a much specific topic. The position of a lecture note is between a book and a journal paper. No publication fee will be involved and hence materials in this track will not be open accessed. Subscription fees is required to access the Lecture Notes. Two kinds of subscription is available: personal subscription and institutional subscription. Details of the subscription will be available soon.

In January 2015, after five years of operations, we reviewed our business model and believed that we have to re-position ourselves. While most people agreed that they pursue the open access model, the support we received from the academia at-large is rather little. Even though we have a very tough review process, we still found quite some criticisms on the Internet, mostly accusing us of "publish for money - if you paid, you can publish whatsoever". You will know such statement is wrong if you are one of our authors or if you have a paper rejected by us. Some people even put us into a list called "predatory publisher", which is unbelievable and hurt. Having said that, we do fully appreciate and thank you the contributions of all our editors, authors and reviewers, regardless of whether or not you have paid any publication fee. It is very difficult to find people who are not only agreeing but also supporting what we did. Once again, to our authors and reviewers - Thank you.

For the already published books and journals (regular journals and pocket journals), they will be reminded as open access.