Vantage: Journal of Thematic Analysis engages with a contemporary issue in every volume and seeks to bring different perspectives together for broader understanding of the theme. The journal is open access, multidisciplinary and multilingual and aims to maintain the highest standards of ethics of scholarly publications. Each article is subject to double blind peer-review to maintain the highest standards of transparency. It becomes the responsibility of each stakeholder to maintain these standards in their own capacities, maintaining equal respect and dignity for each other without any kind of discrimination or harassment. The Journal follows strict publications guidelines, some of which are highlighted in About the Journal, Aim and Scope, Guidelines for Authors, and Privacy Statement on the journal website. The guidelines are applicable for all categories of publications including original research articles, review articles, invited articles, perspectives, mini-reviews, case studies etc.
It is the duty of the publisher to maintain and keep a record of all published articles, honoring the efforts of the authors, reviewers and other contributors to the articles. The publisher supports and invests in the scholarly communication process and maintains scholarly integrity of the publications.
The minutes of all meetings of the Board members and Publisher are kept safely with the Publisher.
Each volume of Vantage: Journal of thematic analysis is based on a contemporary theme. The theme of each volume is decided by discussions in meetings and subsequent deliberations with the Editorial Board and Advisory Board members. The tentative themes, decided in the meetings, are shared with all Board members, and one of the themes is finalized with majority. The minutes of these meetings are maintained by the publisher.
The publisher is committed to ensure that no commercial or other interests influence the editorial decisions, which are purely based on scientific rigor and intellectual merit.
The journal follows COPE guidelines to maintain best practices in publication. Plagiarism reports and reviewer comments are shared with editors and authors (if required, for instance if author needs to reduce similarity or if author requests) to maintain flow of information for transparency.
The publisher provides all kinds of support to editors that is necessary for processing the articles. To make early Researchers aware about publication ethics. The publisher tries to spread awareness among early researchers about the publication ethics by different means such as discussions, organizing workshops and orientation programmes. These efforts aim to make them understand guidelines and provide necessary guidance for adhering to the journal guidelines and publication ethics.
The publisher encourages editors to report any kind of competing interests, financial or non-financial, arising in any article or otherwise. Competing interests may include non-financial interests such as affiliations, consultancies, advisory positions, board member of the project, expert of the project, employment, etc., and financial interests such as travel grants, patents (published or applied), ownership, consultancy, or holding any managerial position.
Articles by Editors or Board members of Vantage and employees of Maitreyi College are limited to less than 10% of the total peer reviewed articles., except in the case when the research was conducted before their joining the journal or if the work was presented at a conference and their work was published as proceedings of that conference in the journal. However, in the latter case, if the article was accepted for publication, the editor or board members must disclose that Maitreyi College is the current employer in its ‘Declaration of competing interests’, and the publisher ensures that the editor or Board member was not involved in any capacity in decision making.
The publisher also ensures that editors are not involved in articles written by family members, friends and colleagues or the articles which talk of some product or services in which editor has personal interest.
Subject editors assigned to a particular article should have the expertise to take decision on the acceptance or rejection of an article based on its merit and to further select appropriate reviewers. The articles must adhere to the theme of the volume. The publication decisions are taken at two levels, first at editorial level and second, after reviewer comments.
The submitted article is marked to respective subject editor, who first goes through the article and makes a decision to either reject the article or forward it for peer-review. In case, the article does not relate to the theme of the volume or does not have sufficient merit, it is rejected by the subject editor. The subject editor may confer other editors in finalizing the decision. The decision to reject the article or accept it for peer review is brought to the notice of other editors by the subject editor.
Once, the subject editor accepts the article for peer review, the article is sent for double blind peer review The peer review process is fair, and unbiased. Each article is sent to at least one or two independent reviewers. In case of conflicting comments from the two reviewers, the article is sent to a third independent reviewer for clear unbiased decision
The editor selects reviewers who have sufficient research experience in the field and are associated with reputed universities and institutes. The editors shall disclose all potential conflicts of interests to the reviewer and discourage self-citation comments by the reviewers.
It is the responsibility of the editor to assess the submitted articles purely on their intellectual and scholarly potential, without any discrimination of gender, race, sexual beliefs, religious beliefs, region, country, ethnicity, or political alignment of the authors.
The editor should ensure that the authors and reviewers are clearly communicated of what is required for the article. Editor should also ensure honest reporting, and transparency.
The Governing Body of the journal ensures that a transparent mechanism is followed for any conflict or appeals against the editorial decisions.
The editor must not in any way try to influence journal citations or ranking. The editor shall not ask any author to include certain references (from vantage or any other journal of Editor’s interest) just to increase the journal citations, unless they are genuinely required for scholarly discussions. If a reviewer has asked authors to cite his/her article in the submitted article, which does not add any intellectual value or merit to the article, the editor must remove this line from the comments before sharing the comments with the author.
The editor must keep all communications with the authors and reviewers confidential. However, in rare cases, such as in a case of investigation of research misconduct, the editor may share relevant information with editors of other journals or organizations to examine ethical breaches. The journal does not publish under open peer-review system, hence editors must protect identities of reviewers. Even if the journal publishes under open peer-review system in future, the reviewer details shall not be made public without their consent.
The best practices to include content created using AI or AI-assisted technologies are available at journal website.
The editor must disclose any potential conflict of interest, in writing, before joining the Editorial Board. If any conflict arises for an editor, after joining the editorial board of the journal, it must be recorded in writing and the publisher may publish these declarations on the journal website. The editor must not involve himself/herself in decision making process where either he/she or family members or friends or colleagues have written the article or the editor has any other potential conflicts such as in products or services. If at all, any such article is submitted, it must be subjected to due editorial processes for decision making, and the editor must not be involved at any stage of the editorial processing.
Editors must keep a track of the published articles, and maintain their integrity. If any suspected or reported misconduct comes to the notice of editors, they must investigate the case, along with the publisher and the Governing Body. In such cases of misconduct, editor must contact the author and inform about the misconduct. The editor may also contact the institute or the organization regarding the same. The editor will use the system provided by the publisher to identify the misconduct. After detection of the misconduct, the editor will coordinate with the publisher to arrange and publish correction, retraction, or any other correction in the article promptly. More information about misconduct, article correction, removal and retractions is available on journal website.
The editor must always be updated about the upcoming policies and mechanisms that protect the integrity of the scholarly record. These newer policies may include updates on the duties and responsibilities of editors, reviewers and authors.
Peer review is an essential component for maintaining rigor and integrity of research. Reviewer comments help authors to improve the quality of their research. The prime responsibility of a reviewer is to assess the article on its merit. However, in addition to this, the reviewer must also recognize ethical issues in the paper or suspected plagiarism, or any other scholarly misconduct and bring it to the attention of the editors. Reviewer must also critically observe that any argument, observation or inference must be accompanied by a relevant reference (citation). Reviewers must observe good etiquettes while writing comments to the authors and be respectful to them.
If any reviewer feels that he/she is not qualified or is unable to critically review the article, once allotted, he/she must bring it to the knowledge of editors and decline to participate in the review process.
All articles should be reviewed by reviewers objectively, without any personal bias. Reviewers must avoid personal comments, and their comments should be backed by appropriate supporting arguments.
Reviewers must disclose any potential conflict of interest to the editor, before agreeing to review an article. The common conflicts include – reviewers and authors have published previously, reviewers and authors may be employed at same institute, reviewer and author may have personal associations or any other conflict.
Reviewer must not ask author to include his/her work in the submitted article, unless it adds significant value to the scholarly work and for genuine scientific reasons. Reviewer should not ask author to add his/her work to increase visibility of their or their associates’ work. In case, reviewers suggest to include their work in the article, they must give clear justifications for the same. However, editors reserve the right to remove any such citation if they feel its not required or necessary for the intellectual merit of the article.
Reviewers must consider any article received for review as an utmost confidential document. Reviewers must not share the article or any information about it with anyone or contact authors. If they need to communicate with authors for some requirements of the review process, they may do so via editors. Reviewers must adhere to the journal guidelines and publication ethics of the journal. If any article contains unpublished material, it must not be used by the reviewers for their own research without written consent of the author. Ideas or information obtained during the peer review process must be kept with the reviewer and should not be disclosed or used for personal advantage.
The reviewers must adhere to the best practices to include content created using AI or AI-assisted technologies in the journal as per journal policies which are available on journal website.
Authors must clearly write the objectives, methodologies, and results of the original articles in a way that they can be replicated by others. The data should be clearly represented, and should contain significant references to support the arguments. Any kind of fraudulent data or information or making incorrect statements in the article amounts to ethical misconduct and is unacceptable. Similarly, review articles or perspectives or invited articles should also present accurate information. Authors must provide clear and complete affiliations, so that it can be independently verified, if required. All financial or non-financial sources, that have either provided funds or necessary permissions to carry out the work, must explicitly be mentioned in the article. If there was no funding source, it must be stated in the article. In conditions of not mentioning these sources, it will be considered conflict of interest case.
Any financial or non-financial conflict of interest must be included in the article. For instance, conflict of interest may arise for not disclosing employment, paid expert opinions, patent applications/ publications, any type of grant, consultancies, honoraria, or any other type of funding or support.
The journal may ask authors to submit data or retain data for few years after publications. The journal may also ask them to make the data public, if required. More information on policy on data sharing is available on journal website.
Authors must ensure that their work is original, however, if they have taken ideas or information from some other sources, they must quote these sources at appropriate places. Any unpublished work that comes to the knowledge of authors through conversations or other sources, including review work, must not be used in the article without written permission from the owner. Authors must refrain from presenting others’ work as their own, or presenting substantial part of others’ work without giving due citation, or using results of research conducted by others. All these come under ethical misconduct and plagiarism and are completely unacceptable.
Authors must ensure that they have submitted their article in one journal at a time, and do not submit the article in another journal unless a decision is reached in the first journal. An article submitted to multiple journals simultaneously is considered ethical misconduct and is unacceptable. The author must also not submit a published article to any other journal for publication purpose. However, if the work has been published as an abstract, or as a lecture or electronic pre-print or doctoral thesis, it can be submitted for possible publication as a full article to the journal.
Authors must use relevant articles/literature to support their arguments in the article. The cited articles should preferably be from peer reviewed sources, and preferably should have digital object identifiers (DOIs). Authors must avoid unnecessary and inappropriate citations, and cite only the literature that adds value to the article. Authors must not add a citation just to increase citations of their colleagues, institute, editors, reviewers, or their own articles. Authors must follow the citation limit for each article as mentioned in the Guidelines for authors.
Authors should not feel mandated to add citations of the works suggested by the reviewers or editors, if they feel that the suggested works are not required or are inappropriate or do not add scholarly value to their article. If authors feel that suggested works have intents other than intellectual merit, they must bring this to the knowledge of the editors or publisher.
The communication between authors and editors or publishers or reviewers must be kept confidential. However, in case of disputes or complaints, it may be shared with appropriate authority to solve the matter.
The criteria to qualify to become author of an article and the guidelines to change the authorship or order of authorship are available on journal website.
Guidelines are available on the journal website.
If the work involves animal or human subjects, it should be done as per the institutional guidelines and after proper approval by the competent authority. This should be clearly mentioned in the article. If human subjects are involved, written consent must be obtained from them and their confidentiality must be maintained at all times. >/p>
For experiments involving humans, work must be carried out according to The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) . If author wants to include details of participants for case studies, or images of patients or some other personal information, he/she must obtain appropriate permissions, and consent as per the institutional guidelines. Written consents must be kept with authors for subsequent years, and produced to the journal when requested.
If the experimental work involves any chemicals, methodologies or equipments that might have inherent unusual hazards, they must be clearly mentioned in the article.
If authors recognize any type of error in their published articles, they must immediately bring it to the notice of editors and the publisher, so that appropriate action can be taken by the editors and publisher, such as correcting the error or retracting the paper. If editors or publisher comes to know of any such error in the article, authors are obliged to cooperate with the publisher and editors to sort the issue as deemed appropriate by the editors or the publisher.
Authors must use original images for reporting their work. They may however change the brightness or contrast or color balance, if that enhances the quality of information presented by the image. However, in no case, authors should manipulate the images for purposes other than clarity. If an author is doing so, this will be considered ethical misconduct and is unacceptable.
Authors must adhere to journal guidelines for providing images.
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