Open Journal

Ethics Policy for NSOU-OPEN Journal (ISSN 2581 5415)

NSOU-OPEN JOURNAL, the multidisciplinary online journalof NSOU abides itself in ethical responsibility towards confidentiality, coherency, and respect to the manuscripts submitted for possible publication in its volumes. The Editorial Board of the Journal accepts the manuscripts having the direct reflection of the authors research works and achievements. Looking into the sensitivity and importance of the academic content, the said journal follows the prescribed ethics policy for all stakeholders (authors, reviewers, editors, others) involved in the process of publishing of the journal. This policy is based on internationally accepted best practices for research Journal.

Authors:

• The Author(s) of the manuscripts should take ethical responsibilities about the originality of content, correctness of results, and authenticity of the resources.
• The Author(s) should not copy the contents and produce redundant information in their paper.
• The Author(s) should ethically respect the copyrights, patents, acknowledgements, references, disclosures, and conflicts of interests as and wherever applicable in whatsoever manners.
• The Author(s) should claim the credit only for work that they have produced originally by them.
• The author(s) should properly cite and acknowledge the work of others as well as their own related work that they have got already published and used as reference in the currently submitted manuscript. It is the responsibility of the authors, not the editors or reviewers or any other board member of the journal, to ensure that relevant prior research outcomes and discoveries are appropriately acknowledged with the original citations in manuscripts submitted for publication.
• The author(s) should submit only original and unpublished works to the journal, no part of which has been previously published in print or online as, or is under consideration as, a peer-reviewed article in another journal, as a non-peer-reviewed article in another journal, or as a book chapter.

Reviewers, Editors, and other board Members:

• The persons concerned must refrain them from any type of misconduct of the journal policies, international standards, and legal obligations.
• The persons concerned must respect the confidentiality of the content submitted by the authors.
• The manuscripts shall be evaluated solely on their intellectual merit without regards to author’s race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship or political philosophy.
• The decision of acceptance or rejections of manuscripts in a volume would be in direct interest of objectives of the journal.
• No person should make or retain copies of the content and all content must be returned to Editor-in-Chief / Editor after taking required actions on it.
• No person should use the content, or any of its part, or the information contained in it before its official publication.
• The reviewers should submit their comments on the manuscripts and its contents and not on the knowledge of proficiency of the author(s). The reviewer should also extend their vision towards the contribution of the content towards the society and the objectives of the journal and provide the comments accordingly.
• The Editor-in-Chief/Editor would consider the reviewer’s comments as one of the basis of its decision about inclusion or rejection of the manuscripts in any volume of the journal though, there can be many other factors contributing to this decision e.g. criticality of the topic, suitability to current theme of journal etc. that may have not been commented upon by the reviewers. Based on all factors, the Editor-in-Chief/Editor would take the decision about inclusion of manuscripts in the journal.
• Blind review means confidentiality of reviewers identities from authors and authors identities from reviewers. Editors,reviewers, and all involved parties should maintain this two way confidentiality of the Blind Review Process.
• The editors should make proper checks to avoid conflict of interests between authors and reviewers.
• The Editor-in-Chief/Editor may skip or add some step(s) in the processing of the manuscript if found utmost needed in order to avoid any conflicts or forecasted crisis. The Editor-in-Chief/Editor however, would be the final decision making authority for such steps.
• No person should forge, misarticulate, alter, or spoil the content of the submitted manuscripts.

Procedure of handling misconducts:

• Editor in Chief/ Editor, all Board members of the journal take utmost care to avoid any misconduct of ethical behavior, yet the things are natural to go wrong due to natural human behavior.
• Claims of misconduct in ethical behavior of author(s) made in written form (print/e-mail) to Editor-in-Chief on the official address/ID shall only be considered for investigation and support.
• All claims of misconduct shall be inquired by Editor-in-Chief ora committee constituted by Editor-in-Chief. Investigations would be done based on the expected ethical behavior of all the parties and boards involved in the journal. The duly constituted investigation Committee shall submit the report to Editor-in-Chief who will then determine the course of action as guided by the UGC (Promotion of Academic integrity and prevention of plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulation, 2018.
• In any case, the journal, or its management, would not be liable to pay any refund or monetary penalties to anyone because of unethical behavior of its member or authors.
• The decision of Editor-in-Chief in any case should be ethically acceptable by all parties and considered final.
• All positions in the Board of the NSOU-OPEN JOURNAL are honorary and people volunteer to serve to the mission of the journal.

Disclaimer:

• All the academic content published in the Journal is CC-BY-NC-SA.
• NSOU – OPEN Journal, does not take any responsibilities of violation of copyright, patent, or any other laws or rules by authors in their content or due to any ignorance in review process.
• We disclaim the responsibility of correctness or completeness of the content in any respect and author(s) is (are) considered to take complete responsibility of the submitted article/paper.