Journal Transparency

Disclosure Summary

Assessing a journal means answering a short list of questions: who runs it, how it decides what to publish, how it makes money, and what happens when something goes wrong. This page answers all four in one place.

Transparency at a glance

Ownership and Publisher

IJCRT is published by IJCRT Research Journal and Publication (IJCRT Publication), which owns the title and operates the website at ijcrt.org. The publisher is responsible for the journal's finances, infrastructure and legal obligations.

Editorial decisions on individual manuscripts are made by editors and reviewers on academic grounds. The publisher does not instruct editors to accept or reject a particular paper, and no commercial relationship — including payment of the article processing charge — influences a decision.

Journal History

The journal was established in 2013 and has published on a monthly schedule since. It carries ISSN 2320-2882 and publishes multidisciplinary research in English.

A continuous publication record is itself evidence: it can be checked issue by issue in the archive, and gaps would be visible to anyone who looked. Journals that cannot show an unbroken run generally do not invite you to check.

Editorial Governance

The editorial board comprises academics and practitioners across the disciplines the journal covers. Board members handle submissions within their expertise, and are expected to declare conflicts and recuse themselves where one exists.

Who decides what

Board membership is by invitation and can be ended by either side. Enquiries about joining the reviewer panel go to editor@ijcrt.org.

Peer Review

All research content receives transparent, double-blind peer review: identities stay hidden while a paper is reviewed, and the review is recorded so anyone can check it once the paper is published.

The full workflow — screening, reviewer assignment, assessment criteria, decision categories and revision handling — is documented on the Peer Review Process page.

Ethics and Integrity

The journal maintains published positions on authorship, originality, data integrity, consent and ethical approval, plagiarism screening and research misconduct. These are set out in Publication Ethics and Plagiarism Policy.

Every manuscript is screened for similarity before review. Allegations of misconduct are examined on the evidence, with the authors given an opportunity to respond before any action is taken.

Corrections and Retractions

Published articles are never silently edited or deleted. Where an error or integrity problem is established, the journal issues a correction, an expression of concern or a retraction, and the notice remains permanently attached to the article. The full procedure is in Corrections and Retractions.

A journal's willingness to correct its own record in public is a better indicator of quality than any metric it advertises.

Complaints and Appeals

Authors may appeal a decision they believe rested on a factual error or a misunderstanding, in writing, quoting the paper ID. Appeals are considered by an editor not involved in the original decision where possible. The process is described in Complaints and Appeals.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors declare financial and personal interests at submission and state explicitly where there are none. Editors and reviewers withdraw from handling work where a conflict exists. See Conflict of Interest.

Revenue Model

The journal has one source of income: a one-time article processing charge, payable by authors after acceptance. Readers pay nothing. There are no subscriptions, no institutional licences and no pay-per-view.

1. Submission₹0Nothing to pay
2. Screening₹0Scope, similarity
3. Peer review₹0Transparent, double-blind
4. Accepted₹1501 / $59Only now, once per article
5. ReadingFreeFor everyone, forever

• Nothing is payable at submission, during screening or during review.
• The charge is per accepted article, not per author, and covers up to 5 authors; each author after the 5th costs ₹500 extra.
• Paying cannot cause acceptance, and declining to pay after acceptance does not reverse a rejection of someone else's paper.
• Current amounts — ₹1501 INR for Indian authors, $59 USD for foreign authors — are published on Publication Charges before you submit.

Author-funded open access carries a well-known structural risk: income rises with the number of papers accepted. The safeguards against that are charging only after an independent decision, publishing the charge openly, and keeping the editorial decision with reviewers and editors rather than the publisher.

How the fee is worked out, and where it goes: Low-Cost Journal Publication Model: How IJCRT Balances Revenue and Expenses.

Advertising and Sponsorship

The journal carries no third-party advertising on article pages, and accepts no sponsorship that would influence editorial decisions. No advertiser or sponsor sees a manuscript before publication, and no commercial party may review, approve or delay an article.

If this position ever changes, it will be stated on this page with the date it changed.

Licensing and Copyright

Authors retain copyright. Articles are published under CC BY 4.0, permitting anyone to read, download, copy, distribute and build on the work with proper attribution to the authors and the journal. Authors may deposit the published version in an institutional repository without asking permission. See Copyright & Licence.

Archiving

Published articles are maintained on the journal website with permanent article pages, and a Crossref DOI is available on request so citations keep resolving even if the site is reorganised. Authors are encouraged to deposit the published version in their institutional repository, which adds an independent preservation copy outside the publisher's control.

AI Policy

Authors must disclose any use of generative AI tools in preparing a manuscript, naming the tool and what it was used for — language editing, code generation, literature searching or otherwise.

• AI tools cannot be listed as authors: they cannot take responsibility for the work or approve its submission.
• Authors remain fully accountable for everything in the manuscript, including any text, citation or analysis produced with AI assistance.
• Fabricated references produced by a tool and left unchecked are the author's responsibility.
• Reviewers must not upload manuscripts to public AI services, which would breach confidentiality.

Claims We Do Not Make

Being explicit about what a journal does not claim is as informative as its positive claims. Every claim on the left can be checked in a click; nothing on the right is claimed anywhere on this site.

Transparency FAQs

Related Pages

• Indexing Verification
• Peer Review Process
• Journal Policies
• Journal Information