Journal of Infrastructure Policy and Development

About Journal of Infrastructure Policy and Development

Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development — Full Profile

The Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development (JIPD) is a multidisciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed, gold open access journal published by EnPress Publisher (EnPress Publisher LLC, United States), with print ISSN 2572-7923 and online ISSN 2572-7931, journal abbreviation J. Infras. Policy. Dev. It was founded in 2017 — volume 1 appeared that year, volume 9 in 2025 and volume 10 in 2026 on the publisher's own journal browser — and it publishes research on infrastructure, economic development and public policy, deliberately spanning both “hard” infrastructure and “soft” infrastructure. This profile sets out the journal's scope in the publisher's own terms, its editorial and peer-review model, its open access and charging policy including the important fee change of May 2025, and its indexing history, including the publisher's announcement that, as of 17 January 2025, the journal would no longer be indexed in Scopus — a fact prospective authors must weigh carefully and verify for themselves before submitting.

Identity and Publisher

EnPress presents itself as a publisher of open access journals and books, operating a journal platform (its Open Journal Systems installation at systems.enpress-publisher.com) alongside its main site. JIPD's editorial board is large — the publisher's journal page has listed dozens of board members (74 in a recent crawl) — reflecting the breadth of disciplines the journal tries to cover. The journal's contact and submission routes run through the EnPress platform, and announcements that affect authors, such as fee changes and indexing notices, are posted both on the platform and on the publisher's main site; authors should read the current announcements page before submitting, because two of the most consequential facts about this journal in 2025 were communicated exactly that way.

Aims and Scope — Hard and Soft Infrastructure

The publisher's scope statement is worth following closely because it defines the journal's distinctiveness. JIPD is “a multi-disciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing high-quality articles on infrastructure, economic development, and public policy”, and the three words in its title — infrastructure, development and policy — are described as core to its vision. Its novel feature, in the publisher's words, is that it covers the whole range of infrastructure, including both “hard” infrastructure and “soft” infrastructure, where soft infrastructure is broadly defined to include the education system, the healthcare system, law enforcement, the financial system, government systems and other types of public management and institutional arrangements.

That definition explains the journal's actual contents, which range much wider than civil engineering. The publisher lists relevant topics as: the education system; the healthcare system; social systems; innovation of policy; institutional reform; physical infrastructure; urban development; green development; climate-resilient infrastructure; sustainable infrastructure; infrastructure finance; infrastructure governance; and public management and business. The journal's stated target audience is academic researchers, industry professional practitioners and regulatory-institution policymakers, and its stated aim is to provide a reliable platform for the transfer of knowledge and to facilitate discussion of development-related policy initiatives and infrastructure. A further statement of purpose, on the publisher's partner pages, adds that the journal seeks to explore how institutional infrastructure may be applied to different physical infrastructure activities with the support of government policies, on the way to the ultimate goal of economic development.

Reading the scope as an author

For a prospective author the practical question is fit. A paper fits JIPD when infrastructure, development or policy is its object of study, not merely its background. Studies of transport, energy, water or digital networks fit under physical infrastructure; studies of school or hospital systems, financial systems, public administration and institutional reform fit under soft infrastructure; and work connecting the two — for example, how governance arrangements determine whether a physical investment delivers development outcomes — sits at the centre of the journal's stated mission. Purely technical engineering papers with no policy or development dimension, and purely theoretical policy papers with no infrastructure or development connection, are weaker fits, and authors should frame the infrastructure–policy–development link explicitly in the title, abstract and introduction rather than leaving editors to infer it.

Themes visible in published content

Published articles illustrate the breadth: education research on graduate adaptability and critical thinking in Indonesia, studies of urban renewal and small-business development in South Africa, and work on inclusive education drawing on global comparisons have all appeared under the journal's banner. That breadth is both the journal's appeal and the point on which authors should be self-critical: a multidisciplinary journal will send a paper to reviewers from the relevant discipline, and the work must satisfy that discipline's standards, not a diluted general standard. The journal's own quality processes, including a manuscript quality check stage described in its announcements, are part of how it manages that breadth.

Editorial Policies and Peer Review

EnPress publishes a consolidated editorial-policies page for the journal covering focus and scope, article types, peer review process, publication frequency, open access policy, authorship, conflicts of interest, misconduct policy, publication fees, language, errata, withdrawal and retraction, waivers, ethics, copyright and licensing, advertising, preprints, ethical oversight, units of measure, data and reproducibility, and its policy on AI-generated content. The headline points for authors are these. Peer review is double-blind: neither authors nor reviewers are identified to each other, so manuscripts must be prepared in an anonymised form suitable for blind review. The language of the journal is English, and the publisher advises authors whose first language is not English to consider professional editing before final submission so that the academic content is fully understood by prospective readers. On misconduct, the publisher states plainly that it will not hesitate to reject manuscripts where academic fraud is suspected.

Publication is continuous in the modern pattern: articles appear online in volumes by year (volume 10 corresponds to 2026), and the archive on the publisher's platform allows browsing by volume and issue back to volume 1 (2017). Authors should not rely on third-party claims about review speed or acceptance rates for this journal, because the publisher does not publish official figures for either in the sources consulted for this profile; any site quoting a precise acceptance rate or a guaranteed decision time for JIPD is not quoting the publisher.

Open Access, Licensing and Article Processing Charges

EnPress states that it publishes its journals in gold open access format: the scientific community and the general public are free of restrictions on access, readers do not purchase any subscription to view the online journals, and the costs of editorial and production work are defrayed by article processing charges (APCs) paid by authors of accepted articles, normally from their institutions or research funding bodies. For JIPD the charge history matters and is documented in the publisher's own notices:

• The editorial-policies page lists the JIPD APC as US $1,800, with a note that from 1 May 2025 the APC for new submissions is revised to US $500, and that the previous $1,800 policy remains in effect for submissions made before that date.
• A publisher notice dated 10 April 2025, “Notice on the change of publication fees since May 1, 2025”, confirms the same change in the same terms.

Authors should therefore budget $500 if submitting now, confirm the current figure on the publisher's fees page at submission (fees can change again, and the page that still displays $1,800 as the headline figure could mislead a quick reader), and note the submission-date rule if their manuscript was submitted around the change. Payment instructions are published by the publisher; as with any open access journal, authors should pay only against the publisher's official invoice channels and should treat unsolicited payment requests from third parties as a warning sign.

Indexing History — Read This Carefully

JIPD's indexing history has three documented chapters, all from the publisher's own announcements. First, in January 2021 the publisher announced that the journal had been selected for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection, with articles published from 1 January 2017 (volume 1, issue 1) included in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). Second, in April 2021 the publisher announced that the journal had been evaluated by Scopus's Content Selection and Advisory Board and accepted for inclusion in Scopus, quoting reviewer comments that it was a well-organised journal publishing well-cited material of scholarly relevance to an international audience. Third, and decisively for current authors, on 20 January 2025 the publisher posted an “Important Announcement Regarding Scopus Indexing of JIPD” stating that, as of 17 January 2025, JIPD will no longer be indexed in Scopus, that this did not, in the publisher's view, reflect a decline in the quality of the research published, and that the journal was actively pursuing other avenues to enhance accessibility and influence. Independent journal directories consulted for this profile likewise show the journal's Scopus status as inactive, with coverage ending in 2024.

The practical consequences are straightforward. Work published in JIPD during its Scopus coverage years remains in the Scopus record for those years; work published now should not be submitted on the assumption that it will be Scopus-indexed, and authors whose institutions or funders require Scopus or Web of Science indexing for recognition, promotion or thesis requirements must check the current status of both services themselves, at the time of submission, against ISSNs 2572-7923 and 2572-7931. Journal-level metrics quoted by third parties for earlier years — for example a SCImago rank around 0.29 and category positions in urban studies, development and public administration for 2023 — describe the journal's earlier indexed period and should not be presented as current.

Who Publishes in JIPD, and Who Reads It?

The journal's author and reader community, by its own account, spans academia, industry practice and regulatory institutions, and geographically it draws heavily on researchers in Asia, Africa and other developing and middle-income regions writing about their own countries' infrastructure and policy challenges — Indonesian education studies and South African urban studies are representative, not exceptional. For such authors the journal offers an English-language, open access venue whose scope explicitly welcomes the institutional and policy dimensions that specialist engineering or economics journals might treat as peripheral. For readers — policy analysts, development practitioners, graduate students — it offers a single place where hard and soft infrastructure are treated together, which matches how development problems actually present themselves: a road programme that fails on governance, a school system constrained by buildings, a health system constrained by finance and staffing rules.

How to Submit

Submission is through the EnPress platform: authors register, submit to the journal via its “Submit to this Journal” route, and follow the editorial policies summarised above — English language, anonymised manuscript for double-blind review, declarations on authorship, conflicts of interest and ethics, and awareness of the data and reproducibility and AI-content policies. Before submitting, an author should (1) confirm the paper's fit against the hard/soft infrastructure scope, (2) read the current announcements for fee and indexing changes, (3) confirm the APC that will apply to their submission date, and (4) if indexing matters for their institution, verify current Web of Science and Scopus status independently. EnPress's published contact address for the publisher is in El Monte, California, with the contact email given on its site as manage@enpress-publisher.com; journal-specific queries should go through the journal platform.

Evaluating JIPD for Your Own Publication Decision

A careful author evaluating this journal in 2026 should separate three questions that are often blurred together. The first is scope fit, and here the answer can be genuinely positive: few journals state, as a matter of policy, that education systems, health systems, financial systems and government systems count as infrastructure alongside roads, water and energy, and a paper whose contribution lies exactly in that connection has a coherent home here, reviewed double-blind in English and published open access for a comparatively modest charge of $500. The second question is audience: the journal reaches a multidisciplinary, internationally distributed readership with strong representation from the regions its papers study, which suits work intended to be read by policy-facing researchers and practitioners as well as by disciplinary specialists. The third question is credential value, and here the honest answer changed in January 2025: with Scopus coverage ended, the journal cannot offer authors the Scopus-indexed status it offered from 2021 to 2024, whatever its earlier ESCI selection and earlier SCImago positions may have been. Authors whose funding, visa, promotion or graduation rules specify Scopus must treat that as decisive unless and until the publisher announces a change; authors without such a rule can weigh the journal on scope, audience, cost and editorial process alone.

Two further checks are good practice with any young open access publisher. Confirm that the article you are promised will appear on the publisher's own platform with the journal's ISSNs displayed, a stable article page and a volume and issue assignment consistent with the archive that runs from volume 1 in 2017 to volume 10 in 2026 — JIPD passes that structural test on the evidence of its own site. And read several recent articles in your own sub-field critically, asking whether their methods would satisfy reviewers in your discipline, because in a journal of this breadth the published record in your corner of the scope is the most informative signal of the review your manuscript will receive. Neither check requires trusting the publisher's marketing or a third party's ranking site; both use evidence the journal itself puts in public.

Finally, a word on citing JIPD. Cite articles with the journal's full title or its standard abbreviation J. Infras. Policy. Dev., the year, volume and article or page information given on the publisher's platform, and the ISSNs where a bibliography requires them. Because the journal's title is sometimes rendered with commas — Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development — in the publisher's own system pages, searches should be run under both punctuations as well as under the ISSNs, which are invariant.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development open access?

Yes. EnPress publishes it in gold open access format: readers access all content without subscription or payment, and costs are covered by an article processing charge paid by authors of accepted articles.

How much is the APC?

US $500 for new submissions from 1 May 2025 onward, per the publisher's fee notice of April 2025. Submissions made before that date remained under the previous US $1,800 policy. Always confirm the current figure on the publisher's fees page before submitting.

Is JIPD indexed in Scopus?

Not currently. The publisher announced that as of 17 January 2025 the journal would no longer be indexed in Scopus; its earlier Scopus coverage ran to 2024. The journal had earlier been announced as selected for the Emerging Sources Citation Index of the Web of Science (from its 2017 content). Authors must verify current indexing themselves if it affects their decision.

What does “soft infrastructure” mean in this journal's scope?

In the publisher's definition it includes the education system, the healthcare system, law enforcement, the financial system, government systems and other public management and institutional arrangements — the institutional systems within which physical infrastructure operates.

What kind of peer review does the journal use?

Double-blind peer review, as stated in the publisher's scope and policies. Manuscripts should be anonymised accordingly.

When was the journal founded?

Volume 1 was published in 2017. The publisher's journal browser runs from volume 1 (2017) to volume 10 (2026).

Profile prepared from EnPress Publisher's official journal pages, editorial policies, fee notices and announcements (including the Scopus indexing announcement of January 2025), the publisher's journal archive, and the Journals World record for ISSNs 2572-7923 / 2572-7931. Indexing and fee facts are stated as announced by the publisher and should be re-verified by authors at submission, as both can change.