Publishing Model
Shodh Sari- An International Multidisciplinary Journal is published online quarterly (4 issues per year). ICERT make every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (content) contained in our publications. The journal is open access journal. However, ICERT make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by ICERT. The accuracy of the content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. ICERT shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to, or arising out of the use of the content. This journal offers masked peer review (where both the authors’ and reviewers’ identities are not known to the other).
Authors are advised to check their funders' deposition requirements to ensure compliance, if applicable.
Responsible Authorship and Contributorship
An author is considered anyone involved with initially involved in conception, research design, data collection and analysis, manuscript drafting, or final approval. However, the following do not necessarily qualify for authorship: providing funding or resources, mentorship, or contributing research but not helping with the publication itself. Authorship credit should reflect the individual’s contribution to the study. The primary author assumes responsibility for the publication, making sure that the data are accurate, that all deserving authors have been credited, that all authors have given their approval to the final draft; and handles responses to inquiries after the manuscript is published. Authors are usually listed in their order of importance, with the designation first or last author carrying special weight, although practices again vary by discipline. Academic institutions usually will not promote researchers to the rank of tenured faculty until they have been listed as first or last author on one or more papers. The journal invites articles from higher education students’ interest in the publishing research areas of the journal, research scholars, and faculty from different institutions, who fulfil the criteria of authorship.
Authors’ responsibility
The authors of each manuscript are asked to confirm that:
1) The manuscript has not been previously published or submitted elsewhere.
2) They made a significant contribution to the work and approved the final version of the manuscript.
3) Their work complies with ethical standards and consents from the subjects.
4) They are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
5) They have obtained all necessary permissions to publish any figures or tables in the manuscript, if applicable as per the ethics and consent.
Authorship criteria
We require authors to refer to the criteria recommended by the Authorship and contributorship | COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics for defining authorship:
1) Substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the data for the work; AND
2) Drafting the article or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3) Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4) Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Contributors who meet fewer than all four of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Additionally, AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper as AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship and cannot take responsibility for the submitted work.
Authors must disclose in the Cover letter, Materials and Methods, and the Acknowledgement for applying any AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Bing) in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data. Disclosure should include - but is not limited to - all prompts used to generate new text, or to convert text or text prompts into tables or illustrations; the full prompt used to generate the research results; the time and date of a query; and the AI tool used and its version. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.
Author contributions
Author contribution describes the contribution each author made to the manuscript. The ‘Contributions’ section should be presented as follows:
(I) Conception and design
(II) Administrative support
(III) Provision of study materials or subjects
(IV) Collection and assembly of data
(V) Data analysis and interpretation
(VI) Manuscript writing: All authors
(VII) Final approval of manuscript: All authors
Changes to authorship or contributorship
If there is any change in authorship and/or contributorship after the initial submission, approval from all authors must be presented. This applies to additions, deletions, changes of order to the authors, or contributions being attributed differently. Any change must be explained to the Editor. The Editor may seek ascertainment from any of the authors/contributors regarding whether they have agreed to any change.
When disagreements among authors arise, we follow the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts.
Recommended Reading: Authorship and Publication — U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Research Integrity
Publication Frequency and Timeline
Shodh Sari- An International Multidisciplinary Journal is published online quarterly (4 issues per year).
Issue first of each volume publishes in January, issue second publishes in April, third issue publishes in July, and fourth issue publishes in October of each year. Please note that there may be an interval of a few weeks between publication and the appearance of an article on Journal website, depending on the time required to process the article. The duration may vary from 4 weeks to 20 weeks.
Data Sharing and Reproducibility
The journal allows authors to share their published manuscripts on various research platforms/ identifiers like Research Gate, Google Scholar, Academia, SSRN, etc., after publication by mentioning the journal name as primary publishing platform. After one month of publication, authors can self-archive the accepted manuscript on their own personal website and/or in their funder or institutional repositories. By agreeing to write for the Journal, authors agree to accept our standard licensing terms including all policies. Those standard licensing terms supersede any other terms that the author or any third party may assert apply to any version of the manuscript.
In the interests of transparency, any financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared both within the text of the article. Authors can decline to disclose their competing interests if they are bound by confidentiality agreements, but regarding this, they need to submit the statement with manuscript.
The acknowledgement section can be used to thank anyone important in the publication of the work who does not qualify for authorship and to declare relevant funding information
.
ORCID for authors
As part of our efforts to improve transparency in authorship, we request that all authors on published papers provide their Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) before submitting/ resubmitting the final version of the manuscript.
Post Publication Discussion
Each author is responsible for providing early retractions or corrections of inaccuracies in published works. Editors are in charge of any author-requested revisions. The document will be amended and re-published on our website, along with the posting of a Correction, after the update request has been accepted. If any reader or author or reviewer have any concern about the article published, they can write to shodhsari@icert.org.in Errata, corrigenda, and retraction can be used to remedy any errors or faults detected in the article.