How IJARST Maintains Transparency in Research Publishing

Transparency in academic publishing is not a single policy — it is a set of small, deliberate disclosures at every stage of the process. The International Journal of Advanced Research in Science and Technology (IJARST) is built on the principle that authors, reviewers, and readers should always be able to see how a manuscript moved from submission to publication, and why each decision was made.

This page describes what we disclose, where we publish that information, and how anyone can verify our claims through third-party records.

1. The editorial process is published in full

Our complete editorial workflow — from manuscript receipt to DOI assignment — is documented step-by-step on the public site. Authors know before they submit what acknowledgement they should expect, what desk-screening criteria apply, how reviewers are recruited, and how decisions are communicated. There is no separate "internal" workflow we run in secret.

2. Charges are published before submission, not after acceptance

Article-processing charges are listed on the Article Processing Charges page. Authors see the fee before they prepare their manuscript. There are no post-acceptance "publication fees", "indexing fees", or "fast-track fees" added later.

3. The editorial board is public and contactable

Every member of our editorial board is listed by name, role, institutional affiliation, and email. There are no anonymous "honorary" editors or fictitious advisors on our masthead. If you cannot find a published-paper or institutional record for a person we list, write to us — that is not the standard we want to be held to.

4. Every accepted paper gets a CrossRef DOI

IJARST registers every accepted paper with CrossRef, the independent third-party DOI registration agency. The DOI record carries the canonical author list, abstract, publication date, and journal metadata, and it is hosted by CrossRef rather than by us. This means a reader can verify that a particular paper was actually published in IJARST without trusting our website — the CrossRef record is the authoritative source.

5. Plagiarism screening is mandatory

Every manuscript is screened for similarity at the editorial-desk stage, before it is sent for peer review. Submissions that exceed our similarity threshold are returned to the authors for revision or rejected outright. Our threshold and screening procedure are described on the Ethics & Plagiarism Policy page.

6. Conflicts of interest are disclosed

Authors are asked to declare any financial, institutional, or personal conflicts of interest at submission, and editors are required to recuse themselves from manuscripts involving people they have collaborated with, supervised, or worked alongside in the recent past. Reviewer assignments avoid the same institution as the corresponding author wherever possible.

7. Corrections and retractions are public

Where a published paper requires a correction, an erratum is issued and linked to the original article through CrossRef. Where a paper must be retracted — for plagiarism, data fabrication, duplicate publication, or unresolved authorship dispute — the retraction notice is published in the journal and registered with CrossRef so it travels with the DOI for the lifetime of the record. We do not silently remove papers.

8. Open access by default

Every IJARST paper is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence. Anyone can read, download, redistribute, and build on the work without paying a subscription fee, and authors retain copyright in their own paper. Open access is not an upsell — it is the only model we publish under.

9. Identifiers you can independently verify

• ISSN: 2319-1783 (Print) · 2320-1126 (Online) — verifiable through the ISSN International Centre.
• DOI prefix: registered through CrossRef — verifiable at crossref.org.
• Publisher: Pearl Media Publications Pvt. Ltd. — a registered legal entity, contactable at editorijarst@gmail.com.

Reporting a transparency concern

If you believe we have fallen short of any policy described here, write to editorijarst@gmail.com. We treat transparency complaints with the same seriousness as ethics complaints and respond on the record.

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