By accessing, browsing, registering a user account, submitting a manuscript, or participating in peer review on solarlits.com (collectively, the "Services"), you enter into a legally binding contract with Solarlits Limited (hereinafter referred to as the "Publisher," "we" "our", or "us").
These Terms govern your rights and responsibilities as a visitor, automated computational harvester, author, peer reviewer, or academic editor. If you do not agree to these Terms in their entirety, you are strictly forbidden from accessing or utilizing the platform.
Solarlits Limited is an Open Access academic journal publisher. Unless explicitly designated otherwise on a specific article PDF or XML file, all peer-reviewed academic papers published on our platform are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Author Copyright Ownership: Contributing authors retain completely unrestricted copyright and publishing rights to their academic articles.
Public Reuse Grant: Readers, institutions, and commercial entities are granted a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive right to download, read, share, print, distribute, text-mine, and adapt the articles—even for commercial usage—provided that immediate, prominent, and unambiguous credit is attributed to the original author(s) and Solarlits as the primary publication vehicle, and any structural modifications to the text or data are clearly annotated.
Exclusion from CC BY 4.0: Manuscripts published by us frequently include third-party content (e.g., diagrams, photos, tables). The CC BY 4.0 license granted to us publications strictly applies to original content and does not cover embedded third-party materials.
User Responsibility: Downstream re-users bear the sole responsibility for verifying the copyright status of any third-party assets and obtaining direct permission from the original copyright holders prior to any reproduction, distribution, or reuse.
Disclaimer of Liability: we assumes no liability for copyright infringement or damages resulting from the unauthorized use of third-party content by downstream users.
By submitting a manuscript and approving its final proofs, the contributing author(s) grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, and irrevocable license to format, publish, digitally archive, distribute, and index the final Version of Record. The author(s) acknowledge and agree that this license cannot be revoked.
In accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, We consider the published Version of Record to be a permanent part of the scientific archive. We will not remove, retract, or unpublish articles to resolve post-publication authorship, institutional, or external licensing disputes. Any alterations to the published record, including retractions or expressions of concern, will be executed strictly in response to fundamental scientific errors, research misconduct, or legal infringements, as defined by COPE protocols.
Excluding open-access articles licensed under CC BY and user-submitted manuscript preprints, all underlying platform source code, graphic user interfaces, structural metadata schemas, digital workflow mechanisms, and proprietary trade names are the sole property of us. They are fully protected under the Copyright Ordinance (Cap. 528) and international intellectual property treaties. You agree not to copy, reverse-engineer, frame, or mimic the proprietary platform infrastructure.
When submitting a manuscript to any our journal, the Corresponding Author—acting with the binding authorization of all listed co-authors—expressly represents, warrants, and guarantees the following:
The manuscript is entirely original and represents authentic scientific investigation. It contains no plagiarized text, fabricated empirical findings, or manipulated visual charts. The manuscript has not been published previously and is not currently under consideration by any other publishing press.
In strict accordance with Hong Kong scholarly publishing standards, any utilization of Generative Artificial Intelligence (e.g., Large Language Models or automated image generators) in the conceptualization, drafting, or data structuring of the manuscript must be explicitly disclosed in the paper's methodology or acknowledgments. Authors warrant that AI-generated output does not constitute a substantial portion of the core manuscript, and authors assume total legal and academic responsibility for ensuring AI-assisted portions do not infringe upon third-party intellectual property.
If the research involves human participants, physical architectural surveys, or visual exposure logging, the authors warrant that formal approval was granted by an appropriate institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee. Explicit, verifiable informed consent must be secured from all participants, including legally binding parental or guardian consent for any participating minors.
Authors must transparently declare any direct or indirect commercial associations, patent holdings, financial grants, or professional relationships that could be perceived as biasing the empirical interpretations of the study. Undisclosed conflicts of interest discovered post-submission represent a material breach of these Terms, resulting in immediate manuscript rejection or formal retraction.
The manuscript adheres to professional, objective, and bias-free language standards. It contains no libellous, tortious, or defamatory statements. Furthermore, the manuscript complies fully with applicable local and national statutes, including the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance and the National Security Law of the HKSAR, and contains no actionable blueprints that incite unlawful activity, physical harm, or public destruction.
We strictly enforce the integrity of academic authorship registries:
Accurate Attribution: All individuals who made substantial intellectual contributions to the research must be acknowledged as authors, and the ordering of names must accurately reflect their empirical contributions.
Post-Submission Authorship Lock: Once a manuscript is officially submitted for peer review, any additions, deletions, or re-orderings of the author list are strictly locked.
Modification Protocol: Editorial approval for an authorship change will only be considered under exceptional, scientifically justifiable circumstances. The Corresponding Author must submit a formal written petition detailing the exact scientific justification, accompanied by unanimous, physically signed confirmation letters from every original co-author consenting to the modification. We reserve the absolute right to reject any unverified authorship manipulation.
Manuscripts are subjected to rigorous single-blind peer review. However, the absolute authority to accept, demand revisions to, or reject any manuscript rests solely with the our Editorial Board. We hold no legal or academic obligation to publish any accepted work.
You explicitly waive all rights to pursue legal, financial, or equitable claims against us for career damages (including delayed promotions, denied tenure, lost research capital, or damaged academic reputation) resulting from editorial rejections, prolonged peer-review timelines, or publishing schedule adjustments.
Editors and peer reviewers agree to treat all assigned manuscripts as strictly privileged and confidential communications. Reviewers are strictly barred from copying, distributing, citing, or exploiting unpublished methodologies, datasets, or theoretical arguments for personal or third-party academic advantage.
We adhere strictly to the operational flowcharts of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). If published research is subsequently demonstrated to contain profound mathematical errors, empirical manipulation, severe ethical lapses, or plagiarized text, We hold the unchallengeable, unilateral right to publish a formal Expression of Concern or retract the article entirely. We bear no civil or statutory liability to authors for executing a scientifically warranted retraction.
We actively support computational indexing and academic literature mining. Legitimate institutions and computational algorithms are authorized to execute Text and Data Mining (TDM) across our open-access CC BY repository.
However, all automated harvesting agents, AI web crawlers, and bulk scrapers must strictly conform to our machine-readable metadata protocols and robots.txt instructions. Automated systems must actively limit their request velocity to ensure server stability. High-frequency queries that cause server latency or degrade access for human researchers are prohibited. We reserve the immediate, unannounced right to throttle bandwidth or permanently block IP ranges that compromise platform performance or attempt to scrape proprietary peer-reviewer databases.
We process personal information strictly pursuant to the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486 of the Laws of Hong Kong) ("PDPO").
By registering an account or submitting a paper, you authorize the collection and digital processing of your essential personal data (legal names, academic affiliations, email addresses, ORCID numbers) strictly for the functional purposes of facilitating peer review, maintaining public author records, communicating editorial decisions, and providing transparent citation archives.
Academic publishing relies upon a deeply interconnected global infrastructure. To properly evaluate and disseminate your research, your submitted manuscripts, email identity, and author metadata will be routed to international peer reviewers, global indexing facilities (e.g., Scopus, Web of Science, Crossref, Google Scholar), and secure cloud-hosting servers situated outside the jurisdiction of the HKSAR. By utilizing solarlits.com and submitting your work, you provide explicit, informed legal consent for the cross-border transfer of your personal data outside Hong Kong.
You agree to fully defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Solarlits Limited, its parent entities, executive editors, anonymous peer reviewers, and digital hosting infrastructure partners from and against any and all third-party legal claims, regulatory proceedings, lawsuits, civil liabilities, monetary judgments, regulatory fines, and legal defense expenditures (including full, uncapped attorney and barrister fees) arising directly or indirectly from:
Your material violation of any provision within these Terms of Use.
Your submitted manuscript infringing upon the proprietary copyright, patent, trademark, or moral rights of any third party.
Any defamatory, libellous, unlawful, or inherently hazardous statements contained within your research preprints or published articles.
These Terms of Use, their structural drafting, your separate publishing agreements with us, and any non-contractual disputes arising from academic or operational interactions shall be strictly governed by, interpreted, and enforced in accordance with the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.
You unequivocally agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to arbitrate, litigate, or resolve any legal dispute, financial controversy, or formal claim arising out of or related to your use of solarlits.com.
We reserve the right to modify these Terms of Use at any time by posting the revised version on this page. Your continued use of the Services after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms. We also reserve the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue any part (or all) of the Services at any time without notice.
If you have any questions about these Terms of Use, please contact us using the details provided on our Contact page.
These Terms of Use were last updated on 28 June 2026
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