Publication Policy and Agreement

Publication Policy and Agreement

(a) Publication Agreement

(b) Publication Policies 

(c) Terms and Conditions

This is a publication agreement regarding a written research article, which is submitted for publication in our journal.  There will be two parties; author and the IJOSTHE (SMART MOVES). As an author or a co-author, you agree to the journal's terms and conditions either by clicking on agree or accept where you are given the option to do so.  If you do not accept our publication agreement, as a publisher/journal, we would not be able to publish the submitted article. By agreeing to the terms and conditions, you accept that you shall solely be responsible for any conflict arising from your research work.  By accepting our terms and conditions you agree that the research work presented for publication does not contain any hateful statement, plagiarised material, or does not contain copyrighted content, images or falsified data.  

Publication Policies

IJOSTHE is committed to fair and ethical publication policies. We adhere to publication ethics, policy, guidance laid by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). Please find our policies below. The following points are only intended to give a broad overview and are not exhaustive. We encourage our authors and editors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) website.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

IJOSTHE strictly complies with the moral justice and moral philosophy and would likewise direct a lawful audit if required on a case-by-case basis. The journal guarantees reproducing or promoting does not impact the decision of the editors. The Editorial Board of the title permits you to speak with different publishers, journals and authors on solicitation for the association. We state the following principles of Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement based on the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors of the Committee on Publication Ethics – COPE. 

Instructions to the Authors

The author will be responsible for the entire research work presented for publishing. The author will be solely and completely responsible for the content of the work and must ensure that the work is not illegal, unlawful, or plagiarized.  Authors must ensure that the manuscript presented for publication does not contain any objectionable, pornographic, abusive, or defamatory content. Our Editorial team will ensure the quality of the research work keeping in mind our brand value in terms of grammar or spelling errors.  To ensure and maintain our brand name and its quality, some editing might be made in the sentence(s) without changing its original meaning. IJOSTHE (SMART MOVES) is not liable to any third party or other person or entity for the work regardless of the fact that IJOSTHE had any knowledge or could have reasonably known of any illegal, unlawful, or objectionable content in the work. You also agree to indemnify [compensate for harm or loss] IJOSTHE (SMART MOVES) in case of any legal proceedings with the third party regarding copyright infringement or action on grounds of illegality as mentioned.  The research paper presented for publication must be original and unique, and the same research should not be submitted to more than one publisher as it represents an unethical behaviour of an author. A proper and appropriate citation or reference must be made on citing the works of others. The reported scope of work should be based on a proper citation from the other publications.

All listed authors must acknowledge the contributions made in the research presented and approve all its claims. It is important to list everyone who made a substantial effort in completing the work, including students or laboratory technicians.

With the submission of the research work, the writer must agree to the terms that neither the work is under consideration nor published in any other journal.

 

Declaration of Interest

The author declares that he/she has no contending financial, non-financial or other methods of acquiring remuneration or profitable interest in any way, or any subjective relationship that could directly or indirectly affect, encourage or influence the described work or the research paper. 

Use of Inclusive Language

Language of the article must be clear and free of any discriminatory remarks.  The used words, phrases and language must not discriminate on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, culture or any such words which exclude a person or group of people.  Language inclusion means writing should be free from any bias comments or bias reference. For example, one may use humankind instead of mankind, or use cleaner in place of cleaning boy or girl, business executive or entrepreneur in place of the businessman. 

Instructions to the Reviewers

IJOSTHE has assigned some responsibilities to its Reviewers, please find below the responsibilities of the Reviewers- Confidentiality: Reviewers should not share, examine with outsiders without the prior permission from the editor, or uphold the information from an assigned manuscript. A reviewer with their expertise should complete the review. 

 Productive Assessment: Reviewer's comments should appreciate the positive aspects of the work, identify the negative aspects constructively, and indicate the enhancement needed. A reviewer should explain and hold his or her judgment clearly enough that editors and authors can understand the basis of the comments. The reviewer should ensure that an observation or argument that has been previously reported be accompanied by a relevant citation and should immediately alert the editor when he or she becomes aware of duplicate publication. A reviewer should not use any kind of abusive language while commenting on an article.

Impartiality and Integrity: Reviewer's decision should only depend on scientific merit, relevance to the subject, the scope of the journal rather than financial, racial, or ethnic origin etc., of the authors.

Disclosure of Conflict of Interest:  To the extent feasible, the reviewer should minimize the conflict of interest. In such a situation, the reviewer should notify the editor describing the conflict of interest.  Sources of economic or financial support for the project must be revealed to avoid any kind of conflict of interest or pressure involved like financial or grant of any source. Any possibility of conflict arising in the form of personal, commercial, professional, political, or intellectual hidden or open must be disclosed.

Timeliness and Responsiveness: Reviewers should morally abide to provide the review comments within the stipulated time and be active enough in responding to the questions raised by the editor if any.

Responsibilities of Editors and Editorial Board:

IJOSTHE editors are responsible to assert the wholeness of the Journal by corrections identifying anything of meaning and looks of concern as early as possible.  It will be the editors' responsibility to ensure the quality of the paper. They will review, evaluate and prevaricate the paper. In the process, they must act neutrally in no external or internal pressure of any kind like economical, non-economical, political or religious in accepting or rejecting a manuscript.  The decision should solely be on merit, quality and uniqueness.

Review Process: Editors are responsible for monitoring and ensuring the impartiality, correctness, thoroughness, and respect of the peer-review editorial process.

  • Towards Readers and Research community.
  • To ensure that the content or the author information present in the manuscript is readable.
  • To evaluate all manuscripts such that they fall within the scope of the journal.
  • Keep the journals internal integrity by recommending the corrections, dealing with retraction, supplemental data etc.
  • Decision Making: IJOSTHE Editor in Chief has all the authority for deciding which research work shall be published.
  • Impartiality: An Editor should evaluate manuscripts without any prejudice towards cast, creed, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, nationality, or political viewpoint of the authors.
  • Privacy: The Editor or any Editorial staff must not reveal any data about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate depending on the need and stage of processing.
  • Conduct Double-blind review process (reviewers of the research work won't get to know the identity of the author(s) and the author(s) won't get to know the identity of the reviewer).
  • Adhere to the guidelines and procedure laid down by the IJOSTHE.
  • Make recommendations for improving the evaluation and dissemination of the manuscript of the journal.

Responsibilities of the Publisher

A publisher is accountable and responsible to work freely with no pressure of any kind.  While accepting or rejecting a manuscript publisher must take unbiased decisions. External forces like caste, religion, ethnicity or financial forces must not affect its thoughtful decisions.  The publisher must ensure the smooth and free-flow working environment. Financial supporters and funding organizations must not affect its internal decision-making body or process. As a publisher, Smart Moves Publication is responsible to provide high-quality research materials or articles to all its users. 

Open Access Policy

In the digital and internet age, everybody looks for the material which is widely available without any restriction or any kind of financial charges. Open Access is a policy, which provides the full rights to the users to access and use the research work free of cost. The journal follows the same policy and provides complete access to its published material.  Users are allowed to read, copy, download, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without taking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. Authors, researchers, and scholars are permitted to scroll through our published research work database and use them for scholarly purposes as a reference. 

Storage and Hosting

 You grant Smart Moves publication the right to index, host and promote your research work in social media or any current or future methods of technology for distribution, marketing and promotional purposes.

Copyright Policy

What is Copyright?

Copyright is a legal law which gives the rights to its original owners, publishers or creators to protect their intellectual property against the unauthorized use of their creative work.  It also prohibits the misuse of the original work in the form of the reprint, publish, or record their material without the permission of its original creators.

Copyright at IJOSTHE

IJOSTHE follows the Open Journal Access policy. Authors will retain the copyright of the original work and grant the rights of publication to the publisher with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY License that allows others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

Authors are permitted to post their work in institutional repositories, social media and/or other platforms. 

As we ethically and legally support only plagiarism-free material and content of the article, we are equally concerned about the quality of the images.  We do encourage our authors to use only original images with full copyright holdings. If you do not want to spend money on images, then use royalty-free images.  The images should be original, alteration free and free of any kind of software manipulation. All the materials (content, images, data, and tables) used in the article must be plagiarism free and should also be free of any copyright issues.  We strictly advise our authors and readers against the use of infringing material of any kind, which may create a legal issue or problem later on in the future.  

Copyright issues can only be raised against the use of copyrighted content, images or only if the content is not cited properly. As a publishing house, we have a policy not to use the copyrighted content without the owner's permission. We suggest our authors to search and download images from the following below-mentioned sites. They have millions of copyright-free images which you can use. You can even use images from Wikipedia if necessary.

https://pixabay.com/

https://search.creativecommons.org/  

Allegation of Misconduct and Conflict of Interest Policy:

IJOSTHE is rigorously following its ethical bonds and publication regulations to maintain neutral and unswayed actions. By adopting a zero-tolerance policy on publication misconduct, we promise to protect the rights of intellectual property. Appropriate action will be taken if we find publication misconduct like plagiarism, misrepresentation of authorship, data falsification (fabrication), manipulation in the citation but not limited to these. However, we do not include honest error or differences of opinion.  Broadly, IJOSTHE tries to keep misconduct of any kind at bay and does not support unethical or unlawful deeds. 

Plagiarism Policy

What is plagiarism?

  • The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th Ed.) defines plagiarism as “A piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.”
  • The American Heritage Dictionary (2nd College Ed.) defines plagiarism as “to take and use as one’s own the writings or ideas of another."
  • IJOSTHE considers plagiarism as the re-use of someone else’s research work or ideas or words without acknowledging the original author and source. 

What Constitutes Plagiarism?

  • Handing in someone else’s work as your own.
  • Putting your name on another person’s research work.
  • Copying words and ideas from somewhere else without giving the citation.
  • Failing to put a quote in quotation marks.
  • Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation.
  • Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving the citation.

Our Policy

  • IJOSTHE considers plagiarism as the re-use of someone else's research work or ideas or words without acknowledging the original author and source. It is important for all IJOSTHE authors to recognise that plagiarism in any form, at any level, is not accepted and we will consider it as a breach of educational ethics.
  • IJOSTHE will not accept any research paper which contains plagiarized, copied, or pirated material. The research work will be rejected and returned for review.
  • Plagiarism before Publication: The IJOSTHE will evaluate plagiarism on its own merits.  If plagiarism is found even after publication, we will have all the rights to delete or remove the manuscript from the issue.
  • IJOSTHE is member of Similarity Check. Similarity Check service provided by Crossref and powered by iThenticate. Similarity Check provides us with a very effective tool to help detect plagiarism.

Anti-Plagiarism Declaration

By submitting the paper for publication at IJOSTHE:

All authors will certify that:

  •  
    • They are fully aware that plagiarism is illegal & ethically wrong.  Authors must be aware of the fact that plagiarism is the use of another person’s intellectual property, idea, work, or published work and pretending it is one’s own work.
    • They declare that each contribution to their article or project has been acknowledged and sources of information from other peoples’ published or unpublished works have been cited properly.
    • They certify that they are solely responsible for the text of the article and research work included in the article along with any incomplete reference.

Guidelines for Withdrawal of Articles

IJOSTHE has deep concerns to maintain the integrity and entirety of the research work for the entire educational fraternity very sincerely. The journal places great importance on the authority of research work after they have been published. Articles which have been published shall remain present, exact and unchanged as far as possible.

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove a published article from our online platform. This will only happen if an article is clearly defamatory, or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect that it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, may pose a serious health risk. In such circumstances, while the metadata (i.e. title and author information) of the article will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating that the article has been removed for legal or other unavoidable reasons. 

Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with an HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the journal’s policy.  

Article Retraction: Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated use of data or the like or similar incidences, the article may be retracted. Occasionally, a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication.

The original article is retained unchanged except for a watermark which is included on each page of the article PDF indicating that it has been “retracted”.

Notice of retraction will be served to the correspondent author with a clear information of Title, Issue, and Volume including the link of the published article. 

Article Replacement:

Authors of the original paper at times may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. Under such circumstances, the above procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the article retraction notice will contain a link to the corrected re-published article together with a history of the document. 

Complaints and appeals 

If there is any kind of allegation of misconduct or conflict of interest arises among authors, reviewers, editors, journals, publishers or by the whistleblower in that below given process will be followed. The following points are only intended to give a broad overview and are not exhaustive. As we adhere to COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics we will follow COPE guidelines on case to case basis.

  • To make a  complaint reach us at editor@IJOSTHE.com.
  • Concern or Issue will be taken seriously and required action will be taken against the complaint (if any).
  • A committee or panel will be formed and a notice will be served by email to the concerned person in 30 days. After receiving the notice, the receiver will be liable to reply back with satisfactory reasons in the next 30 business days. 
  • After receiving the response, the appropriate investigation will be initiated.
  • Our panel will review the case in detail. An unbiased decision or action will be taken based on the final report.
  • For unpublished manuscript, we will review the allegation and make a preliminary assessment. If our panel decides that there is merit to the allegation, the manuscript will be rejected and the author will be notified about the same.
  • Serious action will be taken like withdrawal, retraction or removal of the paper from publication (if published).
  • Unless there is an issue of plagiarism, misrepresentation of authorship, data falsification (fabrication), manipulation in the citation, the published paper will not be retracted.
  • If you have any complaint or appeal to make against the decision of the panel, please address the mail to the publisher and explain clearly the basis for that appeal. And submit an appeal to publisher@smartmovesonline.org and appropriate action will be taken.

APC Refund Policy

In no circumstances, Article publication Fee (APC) is non-refundable even if you withdraw the manuscript. 

Force Majeure

Both, You and Smart Moves shall not be liable or responsible to each other or deemed to have defaulted under this Agreement for failure or delay in fulfilling or performing any term of this Agreement if the delay is due to an Act of God or out of the control of the parties.

Legal Proceedings

The Courts in Bhopal (MP), India, shall have exclusive jurisdiction to decide on matters arising out of this Agreement.

If there is any dispute, it should be referred to an Arbitrator appointed by Smart Moves Only.  All arbitration proceedings shall be conducted in the English language in accordance with the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996, and the place of arbitration shall be Bhopal, MP, India.