Publication Policies

Peer Review Policy

Manuscripts submitted to Viksit Bharat Journal undergo editorial screening for scope, completeness, and research integrity, followed by peer review under the journal’s editorial workflow.

The intended review model is double-blind (authors and reviewers anonymised to each other). Reviewer assignment tooling continues to mature; editors remain responsible for fair assessment and final decisions.

Typical path: submission → editorial screening → plagiarism/originality check (when tooling is available) → reviewer assessment → editorial decision → revision (if required) → acceptance → production → publication.

• Editors may desk-reject submissions that are out of scope, incomplete, or ethically non-compliant.
• Reviewers must treat manuscripts as confidential and must not use unpublished material for personal advantage.
• Conflicts of interest must be disclosed by authors, editors, and reviewers.

Reviewer Guidelines

Reviewers should provide objective, constructive, and timely feedback focused on novelty, methodology, clarity, ethics, and contribution.

• Maintain confidentiality of the manuscript and review.
• Declare conflicts of interest and decline reviews when conflicted.
• Avoid personal or demeaning language.
• Flag suspected plagiarism, data fabrication, or unethical research to the editor.
• Do not use generative AI tools in a way that exposes confidential manuscript content to external services unless the journal explicitly permits a named tool.

Plagiarism & Originality Policy

Authors must submit original work. Plagiarism, duplicate publication, text recycling without attribution, fabrication, and falsification are grounds for rejection or post-publication action.

Similarity screening may be used when available. Conference-specific similarity thresholds from event guidelines (for example SMK event packets) apply only to those events and are not automatically the journal-wide threshold unless the editorial board adopts them.

• Proper citation is required for all reused text, data, and ideas.
• Self-plagiarism of previously published work without disclosure is not acceptable.
• Authors remain responsible for originality regardless of tools used.

Publication Ethics & Research Integrity

The journal expects authors, editors, reviewers, and the publisher to uphold research integrity: honest reporting, transparent authorship, conflict disclosure, and ethical treatment of human participants and sensitive data where applicable.

This policy is aligned in spirit with widely recognised publishing-ethics frameworks (for example COPE guidance). The journal does not claim COPE membership unless independently verified and announced.

• Authorship should reflect substantial contribution; ghost and guest authorship are prohibited.
• Funding sources and the role of funders should be disclosed.
• Complaints about ethics may be sent to the editorial office email published on the Contact page.

Conflict of Interest Policy

Authors, editors, and reviewers must disclose financial, institutional, personal, or professional relationships that could be perceived to influence the work or its assessment.

Funding Disclosure Policy

Authors should state funding sources and grant numbers where applicable, or explicitly state that no external funding was received.

AI & Generative AI Policy

Authors may use AI tools for language improvement only when they remain fully responsible for accuracy, originality, and integrity of the submitted work.

AI tools cannot be listed as authors. AI-generated scientific results, images, or analyses require human verification and disclosure when substantially used.

Reviewers and editors must not upload confidential manuscripts to public AI services.

Copyright Policy

Copyright © Department of Holistic Education (DHE), publisher of Viksit Bharat Journal, unless a specific article states otherwise.

Authors grant the publisher rights needed to publish and disseminate the accepted work. Authors typically retain patent rights, thesis reuse rights, and educational use rights for their own work, subject to the article licence.

Event-specific copyright transfer forms (for example conference Form-1) apply to those events and do not automatically redefine journal copyright for all articles.

Licence

The journal’s stated open-access licence for published journal articles is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), unless an individual article indicates a different licence.

Readers may share and adapt the material with appropriate attribution under the licence terms.

Open Access Policy

Journal articles on this platform are intended to be freely readable without a paywall. Reuse rights follow the article licence (CC BY 4.0 unless otherwise stated).

Article Processing Charges (APC)

APC status: amounts are communicated during submission or acceptance. A fixed public fee schedule is not published on this site until confirmed by the editorial office. Do not invent or assume a specific fee from marketing language.

No hidden charges will be presented as indexing fees or mandatory add-ons unrelated to publication. Contact the editorial office email for the current schedule.

DOI Policy

DOI assignment is planned and architecturally prepared, but a live DOI prefix is not yet configured in production (`doiPrefix` empty).

Until Crossref (or equivalent) registration is complete, articles must not display fabricated DOI links. Status: DOI assignment planned / not currently assigned.

Corrections Policy

Honest errors that do not invalidate the work may be corrected via a linked correction, erratum, or corrigendum notice. Corrected articles remain part of the scholarly record.

Retraction Policy

Serious issues — including fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, unethical research, or major invalidating errors — may lead to retraction. Retraction notices remain permanently linked to the original article record.

Complaints & Appeals

Complaints about process, ethics, or publication decisions may be emailed to the editorial office. Appeals of editorial decisions should explain the grounds clearly and will be reviewed by an editor not involved in the original decision when practical.

Data Availability Policy

Where applicable, authors should state whether data are available in a repository, available on reasonable request, not publicly available, or not applicable (for example purely conceptual papers).

Digital Archiving Policy

The publisher maintains platform backups and persistent article URLs on pub.dhe.org.in. Third-party dark-archive services (LOCKSS/CLOCKSS) are not currently claimed as implemented.

Indexing Roadmap

Currently verified: ISSN registration (2278-1757).

Metadata ready / maintain: Google Scholar–oriented citation tags and crawlable HTML.

Planned: Crossref DOI prefix, OpenAlex-oriented export, OAI-PMH hardening.

Not applied / not listed: DOAJ, UGC CARE, Scopus, Web of Science — these must not be presented as current achievements.

Privacy (Journal Operations)

Submission, author, and reviewer data are used for editorial processing, communication, and platform security. Contact-form and analytics data (if enabled) are handled according to operational needs. Reviewer identities are not disclosed where the review model requires anonymity.