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The Grassroots Institute primarily follows the Code of Conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). We try to comply with many of the Guidelines set by COPE. Further details of COPE can read here.
Other standards that our journals either already follow or intend to follow are as under:
Open Access mean that readers can access published material for free, without paying a subscription charge. Open access publishing provides immediate, worldwide free access to all published manuscripts. Readers can view, download, print, and redistribute any article without any financial barrier, enabling greater distribution of an article.
The publication costs of an article are paid from an author's research budget, or by their supporting institution. The Article Processing Charges (APCs) replace subscription charges covers the costs of manuscript processing, peer review process, professional copy-editing, online availability, hosting and archiving, and promotion of published research. The Grassroots Institute’ journals adhere to the open access policy. Once our highly qualified Editorial Board has accepted the manuscript, authors will receive an invoice including the publication charges for their manuscript.For authors, open access means a potentially wider circle of readers for their research papers, with some research suggesting that open access papers are more highly cited.We believe that open access offers value for money for researchers. We offer a good deal for funding bodies—outcomes can be widely circulated and no barrier for reading offers transparency to those footing the bill. We also offer transparency to taxpayers, who indirectly fund a great deal of research—through open access they have the opportunity to see the results of their contributions.
The journals of The Grassroots Institute endorse and follow the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Joint COAR-UNESCO Statement on Open Access. We carefully address the following issues as raised in the Statement:
Authors publishing with the journals of The Grassroots Institute retain the copyright of their work under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). This license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, provided that the original work is properly cited.
By submitting a manuscript for publication, Authors agree to the following terms.
The journals published The Grassroots Institute allow the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions and will retain publishing rights without restrictions.
The submitted papers are assumed to contain no proprietary material unprotected by patent or patent application; responsibility for technical content and for protection of proprietary material rests solely with the author(s) and their organizations and is not the responsibility of our journals or its Editorial Staff. The main (first/corresponding) author is responsible for ensuring that the article has been seen and approved by all the other authors. It is the responsibility of the author to obtain all necessary copyright release permissions for the use of any copyrighted materials in the manuscript prior to the submission.
What are the rights of author(s)?
It is important to check the policy for the journal to which you are submitting or publishing to establish your rights as author(s). Our standard policies allow the following re-use rights:
Preprint version
The preprint version is defined as the submitted unpublished version of an article, which has not been peer-reviewed, officially accepted into a journal, or had any value added to it by the journal of The Grassroots Institute (such as copyediting, typesetting, metadata formatting, etc.). Authors may place their preprint manuscript on a non-commercial institutional repository, subject repository, archive, not-for-profit preprint repository or personal website at any time. This is not subject to an embargo. Once accepted for publication in our journal, authors should add the following note to the front page:
This is a pre-peer review preprint of an article that has been accepted for publication in [name of journal, volume, issue, year].
Upon publication, authors should link the preprint to the final published article (version of record) by adding the following note to the first page:
This is a pre-peer review preprint © [name of author, year]. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in [name of journal, volume, issue, pages, year, DOI link].
Preprints should not be enhanced or formatted in any way to appear like the accepted manuscript or final published version. Authors are not permitted to replace the preprint with the accepted manuscript or the final published version.
Accepted manuscript
An accepted manuscript (or post-print file) is defined as the version of the paper after peer review, with revisions having been made, but before copy-editing and typesetting have taken place. The accepted manuscript can be made publicly visible in a non-commercial, institutional or subject repository. Authors should link the accepted manuscript to the final published article (version of record) by adding the following note to the first page:
© [name of author, year]. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in [name of journal, volume, issue, pages, year, DOI link].
Authors are only permitted to consider republishing any part of the accepted contribution after the article is published in the journal.
The authors need to abide by the terms of the licence form, The author retains all moral and proprietary rights that are not in conflict with the terms of this licence. This includes ownership of all patent and trademark rights to any process or procedure, or any other form of intellectual property contained in the accepted contribution.
Users may access, view, copy and download the accepted manuscript for personal, non-commercial use of academic or educational nature. Users may not modify the content, remove any copyright notices or author information, or create derivative works.
Final published version (version of record)
The start date for this policy is the article’s publication date.
The version of record as the final published PDF, XML or HTML version of the article. The author is permitted to post, print, or otherwise distribute the journal’s version of record/final PDF or XML published version without permission. Quotations from the article may be used, provided these are of a reasonable and necessary length only, and there is a full citation to the original source using the DOI. Users may not modify the content, remove any copyright notices or author information, or create derivative works.
All the journals of The Grassroots Institute follow the Sherpa Policy for Deposit with its embed code.
By signing the Consent Form of respective journal, the authors retain the rights of self-archiving. Following are the important features of self-archiving policy of the journals of The Grassroots Institute:
All the journals of The Grassroots Institute store all back issues and current articles on its respective websites.
To ensure permanent access to our published content and for long-term preservation of the content published in our journals, all the journals of The Grassroots Institute deposit published articles in (1) Internet Archive, (2) WorldCat (3) Other databases [e.g. Crossref, EuroPub, Scilit, Publons, SSRN, DRJI, Cite Factor, Academia.edu, Dimensions, Research Gate, ZENODO, Scribd, Research Square, etc.].
Please read PEER REVIEW PROCESS section for detailed information about Review Policy.
In the section FOR EDITORS, please read Compliance by Editorial Members for more details about our journals’ Editorial Policy. The Editorial Process being adopted is elaborated separately.
In the section FOR AUTHORS, please read Malpractice Statement for more details about our journals’ Publication Malpractice Policy.
The Grassroots Institute respects your right to privacy. This Privacy Policy sets out details regarding the information that we may hold or collect about you and how we may use that information. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, you may stop using our services.
Except as otherwise stated below, we do not sell, trade or rent your personally identifiable information collected on the site to others. The information collected by our site is used to process articles, to keep you informed about your articles status, to notify you of special offers that may be of interest to you, and for statistical purposes for improving our site.
All credit/debit card details and personally identifiable information will NOT be stored, sold, shared, rented or leased to any third parties. Cookies are small bits of data cached in a user's browser. This site utilizes cookies to determine whether or not you have visited the home page in the past. However, no other user information is gathered.The Grassroots Institute takes appropriate steps to ensure data privacy and security including through various hardware and software methodologies. However, we cannot guarantee the security of any information that is disclosed online.
The Grassroots Institute is not responsible for the privacy policies of websites to which it links. If you provide any information to such third parties different rules regarding the collection and use of your personal information may apply. We strongly suggest you review such third party's privacy policies before providing any data to them.
The Website Policies and Terms of Use may be changed or updated occasionally to meet the requirements and standards. Therefore, you are encouraged to frequently visit these sections in order to be updated about the changes on the website.
The Grassroots Institute encourages the Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards and Advisory Board. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and Editors of our journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.
This ethical compliance is important for those whose research is involving medical data collection from human subjects. The authors need to comply with the WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Additionally, various policies are also listed on WMA website and such policies would be useful for the researchers dealing with human bodies. To read more on research ethics, please consider reading What is Ethics in Research? Also, please do not forget reading European Commission on research ethics.
As evidence, the Methods or Methodology section (or text describing the experimental procedures) should include local, national or international ethical approval statements. In case, the research was conducted where no formal ethics committee exists (applicable to only developing countries), the studies shall have complied with the Helsinki Declaration (described above) as revised in 2013.
According to Simon Festing and Robin Wilkinson, “No responsible scientist wants to use animals or cause them unnecessary suffering if it can be avoided, and therefore scientists accept controls on the use of animals in research. More generally, the bioscience community accepts that animals should be used for research only within an ethical framework.” The authors are expected to be aware of legal boundation on the researchers who use or intend to use animals in their experimentation or field studies. Authors are expected to read and follow the observations and guidelines in this context. Because the journals of The Grassroots Institute comply with the ARRIVE we will need uploading the checklist at the time of submission, if the research has involved animals.
ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) is a set of guidelines to improve the reporting of research using animals. Authors should read the ARRIVE items, crosscheck research work against its CHECKLIST and finally upload them during the submission process of the manuscript.
In addition, we also support 3Rs principals (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement) for humans and animals’ usage in research. Briefly 3Rs are:
Replacement: approaches which avoid or replace the use of animals
Reduction: approaches which minimise the number of animals used per experiment
Refinement: approaches which minimise animal suffering and improve welfare
If plants are involved in your research, authors need to follow Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
Authors must provide relevant documents and unique digital identifier for manuscripts that describe new taxa or species. They should also declare that the relevant guidelines have been followed for algae, fungi and plants, zoological taxa, bacteria, and viruses. Registration numbers for the new species (for e.g., from MycoBank for fungi or ZooBank for zoological species) should be stated in the manuscript. New virus names should be sent to the relevant study groups for consideration before publication in a journal.
To understand issues of research involving Indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge, authors are encouraged to read references in global context, such as:
While documenting and researching Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK), researchers and authors should follow a list of minimum ethical practices as suggested by WIPO.
Australia, Canada and UK have pioneered research ethics compliances if the research involves Indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge. Examples of Australia and Canada are given below:
FPIC or PIC is a very big subject in discussions and use for many decades. To develop understanding on the PIC from Indigenous Peoples, you may please consider reading FAO Manual on FPIC.Another good link for reading about FPIC in general and in special context of forestry. If that is not possible, you should download, sign (or get signed) and upload the Self Declaration and/or Prior Informed Consent (PIC) from Indigenous Peoples.
Authors and researchers should voluntarily(in developing countries) or necessarily (in developed countries) adopt PIC when involving non-Indigenous local communities as participants of their research. A sample copy of such PIC is available here for use.
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