Liberal access to knowledge invigorates scientific progress. Knowledge is universal and should be non-restrictive. Only if the research findings are open for everyone to access, the world benefits out of them. Open access to primary literature facilitates dissemination of knowledge and fills the gap between the innovators and knowledge seekers. When research is made openly available to all, it facilitates scientific progress and eventually results in a sustainable future. From publication perspective, open access increases citation count for a scientific study and enables inter-disciplinary scientific communication.
eCurater is into open access publication in which all the published articles are made permanently accessible online. All the articles are published under Creative Commons Attribution License. However, the authors retain the copyright to their work. The users are allowed to reuse and adapt their work by providing appropriate attribution to the original author. All the published articles at eCurater undergo peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently made available for everyone to read and reuse defined by the author's choice of Creative Commons user licenses. eCurater invites Research scholars, academicians and scientists to submit their contributions that shall be published across worldwide web after a meticulous quality check. Thus eCurater curates and publishes reliable resources promoting unbiased research information with utmost transparency by following international publishing standards.
Conflicts of Interest also known as Competing Interests arise when an author, reviewer or editor holds personal, political, regional, religious, gender-based, financial relationships that influence their roles directly or indirectly. To maintain utmost transparency in communicating authentic scientific knowledge, authors, reviewers and editors must declare the competing interests. If any competing interest is not declared by the author and is later perceived during the publication process, it leads to rejection of the manuscript and the author must suffer disciplinary action. The coauthors of a manuscript also must declare their competing interests. Authors must include a Funding Statement. Reviewers and editors must declare competing interests that involve any close affiliation with the author or any financial, personal interest that could possibly intervene with the process well before beginning to assess the manuscript and can feel free to suggest another member from the board to further the review process failing which subjects them to serious action. If conflicts of interest are found post publication, the manuscript will be considered to be reassessed and might also get retracted in case of serious ethical concerns.
Right from the point of receiving the manuscript until its publication, reviewers or editors at eCurater will not communicate the manuscript’s information to anyone other than the author, reviewer, the Editor-in-chief and the publisher. No peer discussion will be made on these lines. According to the eCurater’s terms, Editors will not communicate the information regarding the reviewers to the authors. eCurater follows a procedure wherein the reviewers know the author’s identity, but the authors do not know who the reviewer is. Our review process is strictly confidential and any information pertaining to the author or the manuscript will not be revealed before the publication. The information of the manuscript shall be kept private and confidential and will not be used for any purpose under any circumstances.
Editorial Board at eCurater follows strict guidelines to prevent plagiarism, duplicate submissions, improper citations and other ethical discrepancies in the submissions.
Plagiarism: The submitted articles should be original and must not be a copy of other papers. If there is any inclusion of previously published content, proper citations should be presented. Any identified plagiarism with respect to the submitted manuscript will incur sanction.
Duplicate Submission: Authors must not make simultaneous submissions of the same article on multiple journals. The manuscript under review at eCurater should not be submitted elsewhere unless withdrawn from us and the same applies vice versa. Reuse of previously published work as a basis for the current manuscript should be clearly declared by the author. It is the responsibility of the author to attain prior permission from the copyright holder to reuse words and figures.
Duplicate Publication: Any publication that has similar hypotheses, data and conclusions as that of other previously published paper without visible reference is considered for corrective action under plagiarism.
Fabrication of data: Any paper that includes reports without carrying out the actual study or fabricating the existing data from a previously held study is considered as fabricated data. Action will be taken accordingly in cases of such data fabrication or in the case of manipulating research materials, processes etc without proper scientific justification.
Un-cited Authorship: All the authors who have qualified authorship should be included in the “Authors” section of the manuscript. The author who satisfies the said requirements qualify for the authorship. They are : 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3) final approval of the version to be published; and 4) agreement to act as guarantor of the work. Everyone who contributed for the study or who was involved in drafting the manuscript, but who does not meet the criteria for authorship, should be mentioned in the acknowledgements section. In acknowledging the assistance of colleagues, their permission should be obtained. If Authorship is not clearly cited, the author might be subjected to necessary action.
Citation Manipulation: Authors should not include citations with an intention to increase the number of citations for a specific author’s work. Editors and reviewers at eCurater should not recommend the authors to include citations that link their personal texts of interest. Any such identified case is considered as a breach in ethics and the breacher will incur sanction. In case of identified plagiarism, either by the editors, peer reviewers or authors at any stage, authors will be asked to either rewrite the text or quote the text exactly and cite the original source. If the plagiarism is extensive, the article may be rejected and retracted.
