Publication Ethics & Policy Statement
Commitment to Academic Integrity
Manohar Publishers and Distributors is dedicated to safeguarding the credibility, transparency, and peer-reviewed quality of our published academic material. Trustworthy scholarly publishing relies completely on objective and ethical practices from all contributing parties.
If you encounter an unresolved ethical dilemma related to a journal, please review the extensive documentation available through COPE. You can also reach out directly to the respective Journal Editor, contact our senior Editorial Director, or get in touch via our corporate email address.
Corporate Commitments
Manohar Publishers and Distributors pledges to:
- Protect complete editorial independence for our individual journal editors.
- Assist editorial teams in managing their publications openly and without outside commercial influence.
- Preserve a reliable and transparent academic record by promptly issuing corrections, errata, or retractions when errors arise.
Editorial Responsibilities
Journal Editors are expected to:
- Develop and champion uniform ethical standards across their respective journals.
- Monitor and enforce compliance with these guidelines impartially, fairly, and consistently.
- Protect the privacy and absolute confidentiality of the entire peer-review process and associated data.
- Demonstrate exemplary personal integrity, actively identifying, declaring, and managing any actual or perceived conflicts of interest.
- Collaborate continuously with authors, peer reviewers, and board members to ensure fair, objective, unbiased, and timely evaluation of all submissions, free from discrimination.
Reviewer Mandates
Timeline and Responsibilities
External Reviewers must:
- Treat all manuscripts as confidential documents. Reviewers must not disclose, share, or discuss any part of the text, data, or arguments with outside parties.
- Refrain from contacting the authors directly without permission of the journal
- Act fairly and impartially
Only accept manuscripts that fall within their specific domain of expertise.
- Reviewers are strictly prohibited from uploading any part of a submitted manuscript, data, or figures into generative AI platforms, chatbots, or automated analysis tools.
- Doing so violates the author's intellectual property rights and breaks data confidentiality.
Standards for Authors
- Authors must guarantee that their submitted manuscript is entirely original work. Proper citations and explicit attribution must be provided for all quoted text, concepts, data, or paraphrased ideas.
- Authors must not submit the same manuscript—or a manuscript describing substantially identical research—to multiple journals concurrently. Duplicate submissions violate global publication ethics, and if detected, will result in immediate disqualification and notification to the author's home institution.
- The author must not submit work that has been previously published in any format.
- The author must ensure that their work does not infringe on any rights of others, including privacy rights and intellectual property rights, is true and not manipulated and that there their data is their own or that they have permission to use data
- Ensure all co-authors meet authorship criteria and appropriate acknowledgments are made in the manuscript
- All submissions undergo rigorous electronic screening via industry-standard plagiarism detection software before entering peer review. Any manuscript displaying uncredited text overlapping, text recycling (self-plagiarism), or unoriginal content will be instantly rejected.
- Generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models) do not meet authorship criteria and cannot be listed as authors or co-authors on any manuscript.
- The author must guarantee that authorship of the paper is accurately represented, including ensuring that all individuals credited as authors participated in the actual authorship of the work and that all who participated are credited and have given consent for publication
- The author should provide details on funding sources in the manuscript
Citations
Citing appropriate and relevant literature is a shared responsibility across the researcher community to ensure that citation practices within scholarly publishing are responsible, appropriate, and inclusive. Authors should not engage in excessive self-citation of their work or of other authors' work, cite sources that are irrelevant to their article, or engage in other forms of citation manipulation. Any type of citation manipulation will result in the manuscript being rejected. If authors receive requests from editors or peer reviewers to add citations during peer review without a strong scholarly rationale, they should report this to Manohar team.
Complaints and Appeals Policy
General Concerns or Complaints
Anyone who wants to report an issue or lodge a formal complaint regarding any part of publishing with Manohar Publishers and Distributors, or about working with them or their publishing partners, can send an email to manoharjournalsdelhi@gmail.com. Be aware that the administrative staff of Manohar Publishers and Distributors do not oversee, influence, or comment on the editorial choices made for any of their journals.
The publisher intends to confirm that they have received your email within a period of 5 business days. Once received, the Research Integrity Manager will take charge of and guide an inquiry according to official company guidelines. This inquiry is designed to confirm whether all appropriate protocols were properly followed. During this process, Manohar Publishers and Distributors will look over the entire submission timeline as well as all recorded messages sent between the author, the Editor, and the peer reviewers. If it is deemed necessary, the publisher might also get in touch with the individuals involved to request more information.
The person who made the complaint will be informed of the final results in a written format. The organization intends to settle all problems as quickly as possible, ideally within a maximum timeframe of eight weeks. Even so, it is important to understand that investigations can sometimes take several weeks or longer. This depends heavily on the specific traits of the problem, whether the required information is readily available, if the case involves multiple papers or authors, and if there is a need to involve external groups or the author's academic institution.
To ensure that a fair and balanced process can happen without any bias, the publisher formally requests that anyone who files a complaint or raises an issue waits until the entire official process is finished before making any public comments about the situation.
Complaints About Publications
Any issues or doubts raised about material that has already been published by Manohar Publishers and Distributors will be thoroughly investigated in strict confidence. These investigations are carried out according to company guidelines, no matter the status or background of the person raising the issue. Often, the publisher will first complete an inside review to decide if a full-scale investigation is actually needed. Every single investigation regarding published items is handled through a cooperative effort involving the creators of the work and the specific Journal Editor. In particular situations, it might become necessary for the publisher to communicate with outside entities, such as independent specialists, funding agencies, or the authors' home institutions, while making sure all actions are done in total compliance with standards.
Appealing Editorial Decisions
Journal editors hold incredibly wide-ranging freedom to decide whether a submitted manuscript is a good fit for their specific publication. Because of this, a large number of manuscript submissions are turned down without ever being sent out for external peer review, receiving only a very basic statement explaining the rejection. These specific types of rejection choices cannot be appealed by the author.
However, if an author firmly believes that the choice to reject their paper did not follow established journal protocols, or if they have clear proof that the peer reviewers made major, objective factual mistakes, they are permitted to appeal the decision. To do this, the author must give the Editor a highly detailed, line-by-line response that directly answers the feedback provided by the reviewers and the editor. The Editor will then review the specific peer review steps that were taken for that manuscript. If this review shows that the initial rejection was done in full agreement with editorial standards, the Editor's choice to reject the paper will stand as final.
Appealing Corrective Action Taken Post Publication
When doubts or issues are brought forward regarding a paper that has already been published, the Editor is responsible for deciding if the article must be formally retracted, or if a different form of correction or public notification is required. As stated in the initial authorship agreement, both the journal and Manohar Publishers and Distributors retain the full authority to implement any corrective measures they think are required. They do this to fulfil their core duty of keeping the global academic record honest, clear, and accurate.
The authors of the paper are permitted to appeal this corrective action only if fresh, relevant evidence that directly changes the basis of the original ruling is revealed before the designated commentary deadline. These appeals will be formally reviewed by Manohar Publishers and Distributors. During the review, the publisher may choose to deliberate with the specific journal Editor, the journal's complete Editorial Board, or outside scientific consultants. Once a final determination is made regarding an appeal against a retraction or an official expression of concern, that decision is absolute and cannot be challenged further
