All submitted manuscripts will undergo a three-step review process: preliminary check, plagiarism check, and independent expert peer review. 

Preliminary check: The manuscripts will be reviewed by the editorial office for compliance with the Manuscript preparation guidelines. Articles that do not comply with the guidelines will be sent back to the authors to ensure compliance.

Plagiarism check: Manuscripts that are in compliance with the guidelines will be checked for plagiarism. We work with CrossRef to use iThenticate to detect plagiarism. iThenticate gives a 'similarity index', which is the word-by-word copying of materials from previously published literature. We use a similarity index to make a decision. Manuscripts with more than a 10% similarity index will be returned to the authors without peer review for corrective action. For articles with a similarity index between 1-10%, we follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) on text recycling to make a decision. Manuscripts that pass the plagiarism check will be subjected to expert peer review. 

Expert peer review: Manuscripts that pass the preliminary and plagiarism check will undergo a double-blind peer review by the editor of the journal. The identity of the editor will remain anonymous until the review of all manuscripts is complete. Each manuscript will also undergo simultaneous independent peer review by at least one expert on the topic. Based on the assessments, the editor will decide whether to reject, or accept the manuscript without any changes, or give the authors an opportunity to revise and resubmit. For rejected manuscript, no appeal is possible. For articles with comments for “revise and resubmit”, the authors are required to address the comments of the editor and also the independent reviewer. The editor will verify the resubmitted manuscripts for compliance and make a final decision. Once the editor is satisfied with the final product, the editor will send the manuscripts to the publisher. The editor's decision is final. We neither influence nor interfere with editorial decisions.

Manuscripts submitted by the editors: Manuscripts written by the editors will be independently reviewed by at least two experts in the field. The editors are required to address all comments of the reviewers. The resubmitted manuscript will be verified by the reviewers for compliance before making a final decision.

Publication               

After acceptance, the manuscript will be copy-edited and sent to the authors for approval. After the approval of the copy-edited version, the publication-ready pdf will be sent to the author for final approval. After the final approval, pdfs will be included & published online in the issue of the journal. They will be open access, freely available under Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-SA.  Each manuscript will be assigned a DOI and archived with Portico. 

Indexing

After publication, the published manuscript will be sent to the relevant indexing database for possible indexing.