Policy and Ethics

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PUBLICATION STANDARDS

The ISRDO primarily follows the Code of Conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). We try to comply with many of the Guidelines set by COPE. Further details of COPE can read here.

Other standards that our journals either already follow or intend to follow are as under:

  • ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is being developed as an industry standard by the publishing industry, working with search engines and other technical and commercial partners. The ACAP pilot project is being operated by a consortium of international publisher organizations including International Publishers Association.
  • ISO TC 46 SC 9 is the technical name for the working group run through the International Standards Organization (ISO) that develops and maintains ISO standards on the identification and description of information resources.
  • ONIX for Serials is a family of XML formats for communicating information about serial products and subscription information, using the design principles and many of the elements defined in ONIX for Books.
  • TOP (Transparency and Openness in Promotion) has set out community-driven guidelines to align scientific ideals with actual practices. Published in Science in 2015 (OA), the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (PDF and HTML) include eight modular standards, each with three levels of increasing stringency. The ISRDO aims to achieve level 1 or 2 in all TOP guidelines for all our journals.
  • PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Authors are encouraged to fill in the PRISMA checklist their work against flow diagram of the PRISM and finally upload them during the submission process of the manuscript.

                                                                                                                      

RESEARCH ETHICS

Research involving human bodies

In case of research involving medical data collection from human subjects, authors need to follow WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Various policies are also listed on WMA website and such policies would be useful for the researchers dealing with human bodies. To read more on research ethics, please consider reading What is Ethics in Research? Also, please do not forget reading European Commission on research ethics.

Research involving animals

According to Simon Festing and Robin Wilkinson, “No responsible scientist wants to use animals or cause them unnecessary suffering if it can be avoided, and therefore scientists accept controls on the use of animals in research. More generally, the bioscience community accepts that animals should be used for research only within an ethical framework.” There is growing awareness and legal boundation on the researchers who use or intend to use animals in their experimentation or field studies. Authors are expected to read and follow the observations and guidelines in this context. Because the journals of The ISRDO Institute comply with the ARRIVE we will need uploading the checklist at the time of submission, if the research has involved animals.

ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) has set out guidelines to improve the reporting of research using animals – maximizing information published and minimizing unnecessary studies. Authors are encouraged to liaise with ARRIVE items, crosscheck research work against their CHECKLIST and finally upload them during the submission process of the manuscript.

Additional (Optional)

In addition, we also support 3Rs principals (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement) for humans and animals’ usage in research. Briefly 3Rs are:

  • Replacement: approaches which avoid or replace the use of animals
  • Reduction: approaches which minimise the number of animals used per experiment
  • Refinement: approaches which minimise animal suffering and improve welfare

As evidence, authors are required to provide local, national or international ethical approval statements in the Materials and Methods section (or text describing the experimental procedures) affirms all appropriate measures were taken. We require a traceable and unique reference number and the name of the ethical review board in the manuscript. In case, no formal ethics committee is available (applicable to only developing countries), the studies shall be sufficient compliance with the Helsinki Declaration (described above) as revised in 2013.

Research on Plants

We also recommend our authors to follow Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

If New Taxa is Invented

Authors must provide relevant documents and unique digital identifier for manuscripts that describe new taxa or species. They should also declare that the relevant guidelines have been followed for algae, fungi and plants, zoological taxa, bacteria, and viruses. Registration numbers for the new species (for e.g., from MycoBank for fungi or ZooBank for zoological species) should be stated in the manuscript. New virus names should be sent to the relevant study groups for consideration before publication in a journal.

Research involving Indigenous peoples and Traditional Knowledge

With the growing human rights concerns and Indigenous peoples’ exploitation world over, research and publishing have come under ethical compliances. To understand issues of research involving Indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge, authors are encouraged to read references in global context, such as:

While documenting and researching Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK), researchers and authors should follow a list of minimum ethical practices as suggested by WIPO.

Australia, Canada and UK have pioneered research ethics compliances if the research involves Indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge. Examples of Australia and Canada are given below:

Australia

Canada

Some other initiatives of research ethics codes

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

Open Access mean that readers can access published material for free, without paying a subscription charge. Open access publishing provides immediate, worldwide free access to all published manuscripts. Readers can view, download, print, and redistribute any article without any financial barrier, enabling greater distribution of an article.

The publication costs of an article are paid from an author's research budget, or by their supporting institution. The Article Processing Charges (APCs) replace subscription charges covers the costs of manuscript processing, peer review process, professional copy-editing, online availability, hosting and archiving, and promotion of published research. The ISRDO journals adhere to the open access policy. Once our highly qualified Editorial Board has accepted the manuscript, authors will receive an invoice including the publication charges for their manuscript. For authors, open access means a potentially wider circle of readers for their research papers, with some research suggesting that open access papers are more highly cited. We believe that open access offers value for money for researchers. We offer a good deal for funding bodies—outcomes can be widely circulated and no barrier for reading offers transparency to those footing the bill. We also offer transparency to taxpayers, who indirectly fund a great deal of research—through open access they have the opportunity to see the results of their contributions.

The journals of The ISRDO endorse and follow the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Joint COAR-UNESCO Statement on Open Access. We carefully address the following issues as raised in the Statement:

  • Consider institutions with smaller budgets and developing countries.
  • Avoid further concentration in the international publishing industry.
  • Explore ways to reduce costs.

COPYRIGHT POLICY

Authors publishing with the journals of The ISRDO retain the copyright of their work under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). This license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, provided that the original work is properly cited.

By submitting a manuscript for publication, Authors agree to the following terms.

  1. Authors will own the copyright to the Article.
  2. The manuscript submitted for publication is the author’s original work.
  3. Authors hereby grant to The ISRDO a free and unrestricted license to disseminate the Article electronically to anybody who asks for it.
  4. All authors participated in the work in a substantive way and are prepared to take public responsibility for the work.
  5. All authors have seen and approved the manuscript as submitted.
  6. The manuscript has not been published and is not being submitted or considered for publication elsewhere.
  7. The text, illustrations and any other materials included in the manuscript do not infringe upon any existing copyright or other rights of anyone.
  8. No responsibility is assumed by The ISRDO, its staff or members of the editorial board for any injury or change to person or property as a matter of product liability, negligence or otherwise of any methods, product instruction or ideas contained in this publication.

Copyright without Restrictions

The journals published The ISRDO allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions and will retain publishing rights without restrictions.

The submitted papers are assumed to contain no proprietary material unprotected by patent or patent application; responsibility for technical content and for protection of proprietary material rests solely with the author(s) and their organizations and is not the responsibility of our journals or its Editorial Staff. The main (first/corresponding) author is responsible for ensuring that the article has been seen and approved by all the other authors. It is the responsibility of the author to obtain all necessary copyright release permissions for the use of any copyrighted materials in the manuscript prior to the submission.

What are the rights of author(s)?

It is important to check the policy for the journal to which you are submitting or publishing to establish your rights as author(s). Our standard policies allow the following re-use rights:

  • The journals allow the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions.
  • The journals allow the author(s) to obtain publishing rights without restrictions.
  • You may do whatever you wish with the version of the article you submitted to the journal(s).
  • Once the article has been accepted for publication, you may post the accepted version of the article on your own personal website, your department’s website or the repository of your institution without any restrictions.
  • You may use the published article for your own teaching needs or to supply on an individual basis to research colleagues, provided that such supply is not for commercial purposes.
  • You may use the article in a book authored or edited by you at any time after publication in our journals. This does not apply to books where you are contributing a chapter to a book authored or edited by someone else.
  • You may post the published article on a website or in a repository.
  • When posting or re-using the article please provide a link to our respective journal.

 

 

DEPOSIT & ARCHIVING POLICY

Self-Archiving Policy

Preprint version

We define the preprint version as the submitted or ongoing version of an article, which has not been peer-reviewed, officially accepted into a journal, or had any value added to it by the journal of The ISRDO (such as copyediting, typesetting, metadata formatting, etc.). Posting preprints can be a useful way to share preliminary research, and to encourage feedback from other researchers in the field before a formal peer review. Authors may place their preprint manuscript on a non-commercial institutional repository, subject repository, archive, not-for-profit preprint repository or personal website at any time. This is not subject to an embargo. Once accepted for publication in an Intellect journal, authors should add the following note to the front page:

This is a pre-peer review preprint of an article that has been accepted for publication in [name of journal, volume, issue, year].

Upon publication, authors should link the preprint to the final published article (version of record) by adding the following note to the first page:

This is a pre-peer review preprint © [name of author, year]. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in [name of journal, volume, issue, pages, year, DOI link].

Preprints should not be enhanced or formatted in any way to appear like the accepted manuscript or final published version. Authors are not permitted to replace the preprint with the accepted manuscript or the final published version.

We ask that authors do not actively share their preprint articles with commercial users or the media as this research has not been through the formal editorial and peer-review processes. Authors and readers must clearly acknowledge when sharing or citing the preprint that this version of the research has not been peer reviewed.

Accepted manuscript

We define the accepted manuscript (or post-print file) as the version of the paper after peer review, with revisions having been made, but before copy-editing and typesetting have taken place. The accepted manuscript can be made publicly visible in a non-commercial, institutional or subject repository. Authors should link the accepted manuscript to the final published article (version of record) by adding the following note to the first page:

© [name of author, year]. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in [name of journal, volume, issue, pages, year, DOI link].

Authors are only permitted to consider republishing any part of the accepted contribution after the article is published in the journal. Authors will notify the respective journal of their intention to republish any part of the accepted manuscript, and we ask that the journal and article DOI is noted in any re-publication as the first site of publication.

Authors must abide by the terms of the licence form, which must be signed and submitted when the paper is accepted for publication. This form covers terms of use of the accepted manuscript and the final published version/version of record, as well as details of our privacy policy, university repositories and image use. The author retains all moral and proprietary rights that are not in conflict with the terms of this licence. This includes ownership of all patent and trademark rights to any process or procedure, or any other form of intellectual property contained in the accepted contribution.

Users may access, view, copy and download the accepted manuscript for personal, non-commercial use of academic or educational nature. This includes downloading and viewing the Journal on compatible reading device(s) or other systems. Quotations from the article may be used, provided these are of a reasonable and necessary length only, and there is a full citation to the original source using the DOI. Users may not modify the content, remove any copyright notices or author information, or create derivative works.

Final published version (version of record)

The start date for this policy is the article’s publication date.

We define the version of record as the final published PDF, print or HTML version of the article. The author is permitted to post, print, or otherwise distribute the journal’s version of record/final PDF published version without permission. Quotations from the article may be used, provided these are of a reasonable and necessary length only, and there is a full citation to the original source using the DOI. Users may not modify the content, remove any copyright notices or author information, or create derivative works.

Deposit

All the journals of The ISRDO follow the Sherpa Policy for Deposit with it’s embed code.

By signing the Consent Form of respective journal, the authors retain the rights of self-archiving. Following are the important features of self-archiving policy of the journals of The ISRDO:

  1. Authors can deposit the first draft of a submitted article on their personal websites, their institution’s repositories or any non-commercial repository for personal use, internal institutional use or for permitted scholarly posting.
  2. Authors may deposit the ACCEPTED VERSION of the peer-reviewed article on their personal websites, their institution’s repository or any non-commercial repository, such as ResearchGate, arXiv, Academia.edu, quickly after publication on the journal’s website. In addition, journal's webpage (where article is published) should be inserted while depositing to repositories.
  3. The link to the original source of publication should be provided by inserting the DOI number of the article.

Self-Archiving

All the journals of The ISRDO store all back issues and current articles on its respective websites.

Long-term Archiving

To ensure permanent access to our published content and for long-term preservation of the content published in our journals, all the journals of The ISRDO deposit published articles in 

  • Internet Archive
  • vixra.org
  • WorldCat
  • Other databases [e.g. Crossref, EuroPub, Scilit, Publons, SSRN, DRJI, Cite Factor, Academia.edu, Dimensions, Research Gate, ZENODO, Scribd, Research Square, etc.].

We have also applied to LOCKSS, National Bibliotheek, ZBW, and others to provide our journals the archiving services.

REVIEW POLICY

All manuscripts are processed using our Manuscript Tracking System. The Admin editor determines whether the manuscript fits the journal’s focus and scope. Once we receive a manuscript, our Editorial Office runs a plagiarism check (using Grammarly, Turnitin or CrossCheck, powered by iThenticate) and screens the manuscript to decide whether or not it should be sent for peer review.

Please read PEER REVIEW PROCESS section for detailed information about Review Policy.

EDITORIAL POLICY

Editorial policy is the set of guidelines by which the news organization operates. It includes the news organization's attitudes toward its community and aids editors in making editorial decisions.

In the section FOR EDITORS, please read Ethical Standards: Editor ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES by Editorial Members for more details about our journals’ Editorial Policy

PUBLICATION MALPRACTICE POLICY

ISRDO Publishers publishes peer-reviewed journals on various scientific disciplines. This statement explains ethical behaviour of all parties involved in the act of publishing an article for its journals, i.e.: the author, the Editor in Chief, the peer-reviewer and the publisher. This statement is based on internationally accepted Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

Duties of Editor in Chief

Duties of Subject Chief Editor

Duties of Advisory Editor

Duties of Reviewer Editor

Duties of Authors





ARTICLE POSTING POLICY

ISRDO does not consider posting a manuscript on a pre-print server or conference presentations to be duplicate publication. Authors can post their manuscript to online repositories, personal and institutional websites after acceptance of their articles. Before acceptance of the manuscript, authors cannot associate the article to any The ISRDO’ journals.

We allow the final version of all published articles to be placed in any digital archive, personal and institutional websites immediately on publication. Authors are advised to acknowledge the journal on the website where they have posted it, add the citation information and link it to the online abstract.

All journals of The ISRDO deposit published articles to DOI [Crossref] and other databases.


PRIVACY POLICY

The ISRDO respects your right to privacy. This Privacy Policy sets out details regarding the information that we may hold or collect about you and how we may use that information. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, you may stop using our services.

Use and Disclosure of Information

Except as otherwise stated below, we do not sell, trade or rent your personally identifiable information collected on the site to others. The information collected by our site is used to process orders, to keep you informed about your order status, to notify you of products or special offers that may be of interest to you, and for statistical purposes for improving our site.

All credit/debit card details and personally identifiable information will NOT be stored, sold, shared, rented or leased to any third parties. Cookies are small bits of data cached in a user's browser. This site utilizes cookies to determine whether or not you have visited the home page in the past. However, no other user information is gathered.The ISRDO takes appropriate steps to ensure data privacy and security including through various hardware and software methodologies. However, we cannot guarantee the security of any information that is disclosed online.

ISRDO is not responsible for the privacy policies of websites to which it links. If you provide any information to such third parties different rules regarding the collection and use of your personal information may apply. We strongly suggest you review such third party's privacy policies before providing any data to them.

The Website Policies and Terms of Use may be changed or updated occasionally to meet the requirements and standards. Therefore, you are encouraged to frequently visit these sections in order to be updated about the changes on the website.


EQUITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSIVENESS

The ISRDO encourages the Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and Editors of our journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

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