ICERT Press

Scope: This policy governs the mechanical, standard, and procedural publication workflows for all materials published under ICERT Press. It establishes rigorous criteria for manuscript processing, technical indexing, and author identification across all peer-reviewed journals, magazines, books, and monograph series.

1. Responsible Publication Practices

Honest, fair, and accurate reporting of research methodologies, data collection tools, interpretation of data, and results forms the bedrock of all ICERT Press publications.

Essential Reporting Mandates:

• Research Integrity: Researchers must ensure their submissions reflect meticulous, ethical, and honest scientific documentation. Malpractices, data falsification, or misleading interpretations are structurally prohibited.
• Fragmentation Avoidance: Authors must avoid dividing a singular research project into “least publishable units” (salami slicing). This practice artificially inflates publication counts, misinforms the academic community regarding the unified scale of a study, and wastes scholarly resources.
• Redundant Submission: Publishing duplicate studies or multi-submitting the same manuscript to parallel outlets unfairly represents the weight of the findings and violates global publication ethics.

2. Professional Authorship & Institutional Standards

Authorship credit must directly reflect an individual’s substantial intellectual contribution to the research study.

Qualifications for Authorship:

An author is defined as someone who was directly involved in the initial conception, research design, data collection and analysis, manuscript drafting, or final approval of the work.

The following administrative roles do not qualify an individual for authorship:

• Providing institutional funding, generalized resources, or laboratory space.
• Acting in a purely administrative, managerial, or general mentorship capacity.
• Contributing peripheral research tasks without participating in the development of the manuscript itself.

Role of the Corresponding / Primary Author:

The designated primary or corresponding author assumes direct legal and editorial responsibility for the publication. This individual must guarantee:

• The absolute accuracy and validity of all co-authored data within the paper.
• That all deserving contributors have been credited and no “ghost” authors have been excluded.
• That all listed co-authors have formally reviewed and approved the finalized version of the draft before ingestion.
• The swift handling of editorial correspondence, administrative checks, and post-publication reader inquiries.

Order of Authorship:

Authors are typically listed in order of relative intellectual contribution, with the designation of first and last author carrying distinct weight in institutional tenures and faculty promotions. Because practices vary by academic discipline, the order of authorship must be a collective, consensual decision made by all co-authors. Authors must be prepared to professionally explain the structural arrangement of the byline upon request from the editorial board.

(Recommended Reference: Authorship and Publication Guidelines — U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Research Integrity).

3. Mandatory ORCID iD Integration

To guarantee total transparency, eliminate author name ambiguity, and ensure that researchers receive flawless global citation credit, ICERT Press mandates that all submitting, primary, and co-authors possess a verified ORCID iD.

• Submission Prerequisite: No manuscript, journal article, review, or book chapter will be advanced to the active peer-review track or typesetting pipeline without a valid, active ORCID identifier provided for every contributing author on the byline.
• Metadata Syncing: Upon publication, the unique ORCID iDs will be hardcoded into the final PDF metadata and digital landing pages, instantly cross-syncing the publication with the authors’ international professional records across global databases.

4. Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Distribution

ICERT Press invests heavily in modern digital permanence. We assign a unique, permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to every asset we publish to ensure lifelong discovery, indexing stability, and professional tracking.

Our comprehensive DOI registration covers:

• Journal Articles: Every individual paper within Shodh Sari and Edumania receives a distinct article-level DOI.
• Magazine Features: Selected scholarly articles within Eduphoria are assigned persistent digital identifiers.
• Monographs & Scholarly Books: Every volume published under the ICERT Pitara imprint receives a core book-level DOI.
• Individual Book Chapters: To maximize citation capabilities for edited volumes, every separate chapter within an ICERT Pitara book receives its own unique chapter-level DOI.

Authors must grant explicit permission to the publisher to embed these DOIs, crawl metadata fields, and syndicate the final outputs to international indexing platforms.

5. Open Access, Creative Commons, & Licensing Statement

To promote global knowledge equity and clear institutional barriers to research, ICERT Press champions immediate open access distribution models.

• The Open Access Model: All journals and selected open volumes operate on a true Open Access framework. All final versions of record are universally accessible via the internet immediately upon publication, free of charge, with no subscription walls or login hurdles.
• Creative Commons Licensing: All open-access articles and chapters are published and distributed under the explicit terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Under this license, the public is free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided the original authors are formally cited.
• Copyright Retention: Authors publishing within this master framework retain full, unrestricted copyright over their text. Authors retain the legal right to reuse, republish, self-archive, or expand their findings into subsequent volumes, textbooks, or institutional repositories post-publication without requiring permission from the publisher.

6. Plagiarism & Literature Integrity

• Zero-Tolerance Infrastructure: ICERT Press enforces a rigid, software-backed zero-tolerance plagiarism layout. All incoming papers, manuscripts, and book layout text must clear strict pre-screening sweeps using enterprise tools (e.g., Turnitin / iThenticate) prior to panel assignment.
• Errata, Corrections, and Retractions: The integrity of scientific literature relies on the rapid tracking and correction of flawed, mistaken, or misleading data. A formal decision to issue an Erratum, Correction, or Retraction is never taken lightly by the editorial office and requires the active involvement, review, and consensus of all original co-authors.

7. Responsible Reference Citation

The references cited within a publication establish the verifiable scientific lineage of the new findings. Appropriate, rigorous reference citation is the foundation of professional scientific reporting.

Authors hold sole responsibility for:

• Including adequate, precise, and high-quality references that transparently document the origins of their arguments and methodologies.
• Verifying that all referenced works are highly accurate and completely consistent with the data credited to them.
• Prioritizing primary and original research sources over secondary summaries whenever possible.
• Ensuring all bibliography listings match the exact formatting style guide required by the target journal or press imprint.

Notice to Authors: Authors are legally required to thoroughly read and accept the specific publication guidelines of their target journal, magazine, or book series before submitting materials to the editorial desk. For journal-specific requirements or book proposal forms, please visit the respective publication landing pages via the main directory menu.