Publication Ethics

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Section A: Publication and authorship 

  1. All submitted papers are subject to a strict peer-review process by at least two reviewers that are experts in the area of the particular article.
  2. The review process is a blind peer review.
  3. The factors that are taken into account in the review are relevance, soundness, significance, originality, readability, and language.
  4. The possible decisions include acceptance, acceptance with revisions, or rejection.
  5. If authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised bid will be accepted.
  6. Rejected articles will not be re-reviewed.
  7. The paper acceptance is constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism.
  8. No research can be included in more than one publication. 

Section B: Authors’ responsibilities

  1. Authors must certify that their manuscripts are their original work.
  2. Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere.
  3. Authors must certify that the manuscript is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. 
  4. Authors must participate in the peer-review process. 
  5. Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
  6. All Authors mentioned in the paper must have significantly contributed to the research.
  7. Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
  8. Authors must notify the Editors of any conflicts of interest.
  9. Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript.
  10. Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors. 

Section C: Reviewers’ responsibilities

  1. Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information. 
  2. Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author
  3. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments
  4. Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
  5. Reviewers should also call to the Editor in Chief’s attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
  6. Reviewers should not review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers. 

Section D: Editors’ responsibilities

  1. Editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
  2. Editors are responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication.
  3. Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
  4. Editors should guarantee the quality of the papers and the integrity of the academic record.
  5. Editors should publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.
  6. Editors should have a clear picture of the research’s funding sources.
  7. Editors should base their decisions solely one the papers’ importance, originality, clarity, and relevance to publication’s scope.
  8. Editors should not reverse their decisions nor overturn the ones of previous editors without serious reason. 
  9. Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers. 
  10. Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to internationally accepted ethical guidelines.
  11. Editors should only accept a paper when reasonably sure.
  12. Editors should act if they suspect misconduct, whether a paper is published or unpublished, and make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem.
  13. Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions; they should have proof of misconduct.
  14. Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers, and board members.

The policy of Screening for Plagiarism

Papers submitted to International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH will be screened for plagiarism using CrossCheck/iThenticate plagiarism detection tools. International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH will immediately reject papers leading to plagiarism or self-plagiarism.

Before submitting articles to reviewers, those are first checked for similarity/plagiarism tool, by a member of the editorial team. The papers presented to the International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH must have a similarity level of less than 15%.

Plagiarism is exposing another person’s thoughts or words as though they were your own, without permission, credit, or acknowledgement, or because of failing to cite the sources properly. Plagiarism can take diverse forms, from literal copying to paraphrasing the work of another. To accurately judge whether an author has plagiarized, we emphasize the following possible situations:

  • An author may duplicate another author's work verbatim, in whole or in part, without obtaining permission, acknowledging the source, or referencing the source. This technique can be detected through a comparison of the source and the manuscript/work accused of plagiarism.
  • Significant copying entails an author reproducing a substantial portion of another author's work without permission, acknowledgement, or citation. The term itself can be interpreted in terms of both quality and quantity and is frequently used in the context of intellectual property. The term "condition" refers to the copied text's relative significance in relation to the entire work.
  • Paraphrasing is the process of incorporating ideas, words, or phrases from another source into new sentences inside the text. When the author fails to properly cite or acknowledge the original work/author, this practice becomes unethical. This is the more serious type of plagiarism to be recognised.

Text-recycling/Self-plagiarism Policy

Reproduction, in part or whole, of one's own previously, published work without adequate citation and proper acknowledgement and claiming the most recent work as new and original for any academic advantage amounts to "text recycling" (also known as "self-plagiarism") and is not acceptable

Text-recycling/self-plagiarism includes:

  • Republishing the same paper already published elsewhere without due and full citation;
  • Publishing smaller/excerpted work from a longer and previous without due and full citations in order to show a larger number of publications;
  • Reusing data already used in a published work, or communicated for publication, in another work without due and full citation;
  • Breaking up a longer/larger study into smaller sections and publishing them as altogether new work without due and full citation;
  • Paraphrasing one's own previously published work without due and full citation of the original.

Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects

As a result of the trend, researchers who do human subjects research are now required to declare that they have acted in line with any local or governmental rules and regulations regulating their research prior to publication. This has grown more prevalent in recent years.

Researchers that use human subjects or volunteers in their studies must adhere to strict ethical and regulatory guidelines. An important consideration for authors is that their human study must adhere to all applicable laws and regulations and the broad principles outlined below. To be on the safe side, authors should also make sure that their research practises adhering to the Ethics and Professional Conduct and other national and international standards, such as the Declaration of Helsinki, the Belmont Report, and the Common Rule. Suggestions of such standards include, but are not limited to the following:

  • minimization of possible harms, making sure any risks are worth the possible benefits.
  • protecting the privacy and right to make decisions for people who take part and subjects.
  • adhering to relevant institutional, national, and international rules and laws.
  • adhering to the idea of informed consent.
  • adhering to the principle of justice

Roles and Responsibilities

Authors- It is the authors' responsibility (individually and collectively) to adhere to and demonstrate compliance with this Policy. Authors are responsible for having their study reviewed and approved by local ethical review boards where such boards are necessary. Additionally, authors are accountable for the research's overall ethical conduct. All Authors must be prepared to give verifiable evidence that they followed local ethical and legal norms, as ShodhKosh may seek such documentation at any point following submission of the Work and prior to or after the publication of the Work.

Editors- EICs and AEs are responsible for informing authors of the presence of this policy. Additionally, they are in charge of establishing and explaining any publication-specific human subjects research policy. EICs and AEs are ultimately responsible for determining the appropriate mechanisms for enforcing this policy (including optionally such as questions about human participants and requiring submission of any appropriate documents as part of article submission) and for determining whether a submission is under review should be rejected for violating this policy.

Peer Reviewers- Reviewers have the possibility (and, if specified by the EICs and AEs, the need) to assess whether the human subjects research they are examining was done ethically and in accordance with applicable local regulations. Such concerns may be highlighted in reviews or by contacting the appropriate Editor directly.

Violations

Granthaalayah will examine alleged violations of this Policy upon obtaining reliable information from a specified individual(s) that an author(s) may have violated this Policy. To the degree practicable, claimants' identities will be kept secret.

The Editor-in-Chief will either engage directly with the author(s) to ensure compliance with this Policy or reject the submission if an accusation of potential misconduct relates to an unpublished submission to the journal.

When a complaint of possible misconduct relates to a work already published by Granthaalayah, the Granthaalayah Board shall determine whether the work breaches this policy. Granthaalayah will collaborate with the Board to conduct an investigation and provide advice on the issue.

Additional Resources

  • WMA Declaration of Helsinki – ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. Available on
  • The Belmont Report. Available on
  • International Compilation of Human Research Standards, 2020 Edition. Available on
  • Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects ('Common Rule'). Available on
  • Ethical concerns about a study involving human subjects, COPE. Available on
  • Committee on Human Research. Available on

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Archiving

This journal utilizes the PORTICO system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...

Withdrawal of Manuscripts

The author is not allowed to withdraw submitted manuscripts, because the withdrawal is a waste of valuable resources that editors and referees spent a great deal of time processing submitted manuscript, and works invested by the publisher.

If the author still requests withdrawal of his/her manuscript when the manuscript is still in the peer-reviewing process, the author will be punished with paying USD ($) 200 or INR 2000 (Indian Author) per document, as withdrawal penalty to the publisher. However, it is unethical to withdraw a submitted manuscript from one journal if accepted by another journal.

The withdrawal of the manuscript after the manuscript is accepted for publication; the author will be punished by paying USD ($) 400 or INR 4000 (Indian Author) per document. Removal of paper is only allowed after the withdrawal penalty has been fully paid to the Publisher. If the author doesn't agree to pay the death, the author and his/her affiliation will be blacklisted for publication in this journal. Even his/her previously published articles will be removed from our online system.

Article Retraction

Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by Granthaalayah:

  1. The title in meta data will be updated to insert the word "WITHDRAWN:" ahead of the existing title.
  2. The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is "WITHDRAWN"
  3. The Notices of retraction will be updated in abstract section of meta data with Article citing details, Article retracted by and Reason(s) for retraction.
  4. The HTML version of the document will be removed.
  5. Any other format galley will be removed.

Note that if Authors retain copyright for an article this does not mean they automatically have the right to retract it after publication. The integrity of the published scientific record is of paramount importance and COPE’s Retraction Guidelines still apply in such cases.