RAME PUBLISHERS

The publication of an article in a peer-reviewed journal represents a direct contribution to human scientific knowledge and reflects the technical competence and integrity of the authors, reviewers, editors, and supporting institutions. RAME Publishers enforces rigorous editorial standards across all affiliated journals to ensure objectivity, transparency, and research reproducibility.

As the organizational and technical custodian of scholarly publications, RAME Publishers is committed to the following duties:

• Editorial Independence: Guaranteeing that editorial decisions remain entirely independent of commercial interests, financial considerations, advertising, or organizational pressures.
• Editorial Governance: Appointing competent, recognized academic authorities to lead journals and empowering editorial teams to manage rigorous peer-review processes.
• Integrity Oversight: Supporting editors in investigating suspected research misconduct, publishing formal errata/corrigenda, and issuing retractions whenever scientific validity is compromised.
• Long-Term Preservation: Ensuring permanent digital preservation of all published open-access literature through persistent archiving networks, including Crossref and digital repository networks.

Editors-in-Chief, Associate Editors, and Editorial Board members exercise editorial stewardship with the following obligations:

• Impartial Decisions: Evaluating manuscripts solely based on technical merit, scientific validity, originality, and scope relevance, without regard to the authors' nationality, gender, religion, or institutional affiliation.
• Peer Review Management: Ensuring fair, constructive, and rigorous double-blind peer review by selecting independent referees who possess relevant technical expertise and have no competing interests.
• Strict Confidentiality: Treating submitted manuscripts, reviewer evaluations, and author communications as strictly privileged material, prohibiting premature disclosure or unauthorized use of unpublished data.
• Conflict Recusal: Recusing themselves immediately from handling manuscripts submitted by personal associates, immediate department colleagues, or research projects in which they hold a direct financial or academic stake.

Peer reviewers provide vital critical assessments to guide editorial decisions and assist authors in enhancing their contributions:

• Objective Critique: Providing honest, constructive, and technically supported feedback within the designated deadline, free from personal hostility, subjective dismissal, or biased remarks.
• Confidentiality Maintenance: Keeping all reviewed manuscripts privileged and confidential. Reviewers must not download, share, retain, or feed unpublished manuscripts into unauthorized platforms or public generative AI engines.
• Mandatory Conflict Disclosure: Declining review invitations whenever an active supervisory, collaborative, financial, or competitive relationship exists with any contributing author.
• Plagiarism & Redundancy Detection: Alerting the handling editor promptly if there are substantial similarities between the manuscript under evaluation and any other published work or ongoing submission.

Authors submitting original research to RAME journals commit to the following professional benchmarks:

• Originality & Plagiarism Prohibition: Guaranteeing that the manuscript is entirely their original contribution. Textual overlap, direct quotation, or conceptual borrowing must be cited comprehensively. Cumulative similarity must remain strictly below the journal threshold of 20%.
• Singular Submission: Ensuring that the manuscript is not concurrently submitted, under consideration, or published elsewhere in any form.
• Authorship Integrity: Restricting authorship credit exclusively to individuals who made substantial intellectual contributions to concept design, experimentation, data acquisition, analysis, or manuscript drafting. Gift, guest, or ghost authorships are strictly prohibited.
• Data Availability & Reproducibility: Maintaining original research datasets, laboratory notes, and code repositories, and presenting them upon editorial request to confirm results.
• Mandatory Disclosures: Disclosing all relevant research grants, corporate sponsorships, employment relationships, and institutional funding, along with an explicit conflict of interest declaration.

The journal is committed to preserving the integrity and accuracy of the scholarly record. Minor technical errors, oversights, or omissions that do not compromise the fundamental validity of the research conclusions are addressed through formal corrections:

• Erratum (Publisher Error): Issued when a substantial typographical, formatting, typesetting, or indexing error is introduced during production by the publisher or editorial staff.
• Corrigendum (Author Error): Issued when authors report an unintentional mathematical, experimental, typographical, or attribution error that requires formal correction.

• Corrections are published in the next available issue as standalone, citable items assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
• The original article remains in place with an explicit, permanent link directing readers to the correction notice.
• The original PDF is updated only when strictly necessary, retaining an embedded notice indicating the modification date and pointing to the correction document.

When serious scientific flaws, ethical transgressions, or severe data invalidations emerge, the journal will retract the affected publication to maintain the purity of the scientific record.

An article will be considered for retraction if:

• Clear, verifiable evidence indicates that the conclusions are invalid due to scientific misconduct (including data fabrication, falsification, or deceptive image manipulation) or critical honest errors in calculation/methodology.
• The manuscript constitutes unauthorized redundant publication, substantial plagiarism, or copyright infringement.
• Ethical authorizations (such as institutional review board approval or informed participant consent) were falsified, absent, or breached.
• Peer-review manipulation, fabricated reviewer identities, or unauthorized citation stacking compromised the editorial evaluation.

• A formal Retraction Notice is published under its own DOI, signed by the Editor-in-Chief, the authors, or both. The notice explicitly outlines the reasons for retraction.
• To preserve the historical and legal scientific record, the retracted article is not deleted from the website or archives.
• A prominent, permanent watermark reading "RETRACTED" is added across all pages of the article's full-text PDF, and a notice is appended to the online article landing page.

The journal and RAME Publishers enforce a zero-tolerance stance toward research misconduct:

• Plagiarism and Unoriginal Text: Every submitted manuscript is evaluated using industry-standard similarity-detection software (iThenticate). Submissions exhibiting uncredited duplication, text-recycling without justification, or paraphrasing without citation are rejected immediately. Post-publication discoveries of plagiarism trigger immediate investigation and potential retraction.
• Data Fabrication and Falsification: Suspected cases of fabricated data, manipulated numerical values, or spliced/adjusted figures will require the authors to provide the original, raw data sets. Inability or refusal to supply raw source data upon request is grounds for immediate rejection or retraction.
• Authorship Disputes: Authorship must be restricted solely to individuals who made substantial intellectual contributions to research conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or drafting. Adding gift, guest, or ghost authors is strictly prohibited. Changes to the author list after submission require formal written authorization from every author.
• Expressions of Concern: If credible concerns regarding research validity or integrity are brought to the editor's attention, and an institutional investigation is prolonged or indecisive, the journal may publish an interim "Expression of Concern" to alert readers while inquiries remain ongoing.
• Reporting and Due Process: Allegations of misconduct can be submitted directly to the editorial office at editor.support@rame.org.in. All inquiries are conducted confidentially and objectively. Authors are given an opportunity to respond to allegations before formal sanctions or retraction procedures are finalized.