Why publish with us

Benefits of publishing with us

Over thousands of authors have chosen to publish with us over the past 42 years because of the service and results we deliver, We pride ourselves on providing a supportive and accessible service for our authors throughout the publishing process.

1. Speed of Publications

We offer fast publication while providing rigorous peer review to maintain the integrity of information.

2. Quality

We are committed to the highest standards of peer review.

3. Visibility

We’re committed to promoting your research as widely as we can and providing as much visibility and exposure for your article as possible. Since our journals are now being made available online, we have a dedicated team who work with global Data Repositories & Indexing agencies to highlight research of interest to the science community.

Editorial Policy

The following policies apply to all journals published by Messers Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh (BSMPS). Please read these policies in full before submitting your article, to ensure you've correctly followed all the requirements.

1. Affiliations

You and your co-authors must list all relevant affiliations to attribute where the research or scholarly work was approved and/or supported and/or conducted.

For non-research articles, you must list your current institutional affiliation.

If you have moved to a different institution before the article has been published, you should list the affiliation where the work was conducted, and include a note to state your current affiliation.

If you do not have a current relevant institutional affiliation you should state your independent status.

2. Appeals and Complaints

BSMPS journals although not a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) but had adopted and follow COPE guidelines on appeals to journal editor decisions and complaints about a journal’s editorial management of the peer review process.

1. Peer review appeals and complaints from authors

Editor decisions

We welcome genuine appeals to editor decisions. However, you will need to provide strong evidence or new data/information in response to the editor’s and reviewers’ comments.

For scholarly articles of an opinion nature an appeal is less likely to overturn an editor’s decision. These include viewpoints, commentaries, and book reviews, where editorial judgment about readability and relevance weighs most heavily. In any case, all opinion-led articles should be evidence-based and fully referenced. For opinion-led articles, you should always present your evidence and explain how it led you to form your opinion.

Editors don’t expect frequent appeals and they rarely reverse their original decisions. Therefore, if you receive a decision to reject your manuscript, you are strongly advised to submit to another journal. The decision to reject a manuscript for publication will often involve the editor’s judgment of priority/ importance. These are things which authors usually cannot address through an appeal. However, if you believe that there is a case to be made for a genuine appeal please follows the instructions below.

• If you wish to appeal a journal editor’s decision, please submit an appeal letter to the journal’s online editorial office. Please address this to the editor and explain clearly the basis for an appeal. You should:
• Detail why you disagree with the decision. Please provide specific responses to any of the editor’s and/or reviewers’ comments that contributed to the reject decision.
• Provide any new information or data that you would like the journal to take into consideration.
• Provide evidence if you believe a reviewer has made technical errors in their assessment of your manuscript.
• Include evidence if you believe a reviewer may have a conflict of interest.

After receiving the appeal, editors may involve any associate editors who handled the peer review of the original submission and/or BSMPS, depending on the nature of the appeal. Editors may confirm their decision to reject the manuscript, invite a revised manuscript, or seek additional peer- or statistical review of the original manuscript.

Editors will consider one appeal per article and all decisions on appeals are final. The timely review and decision-making process for new submissions will take precedence over appeals.

Where you, as an author, wish to comment on aspects of the journal’s editorial management please Contact Us and select “Other” as the topic.

It is important to note that BSMPS cannot consider appeals where the subject matter is the focus of on-going legal proceedings. Similarly, we reserve the right to decline, suspend or to discontinue an appeal made under this policy in the event that legal proceedings commence and the claim concerns the same subject matter as the appeal.

3. Conflict of Interest Policy

Public trust in the scientific process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how transparently conflicts of interest are handled during the planning, implementation, writing, peer review, editing, and publication of scientific work. Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest. Journal submissions are assigned to editors in an effort to minimize potential conflicts of interest. The following relationships between editors and authors are considered conflicts and are avoided: Current colleagues, recent colleagues, recent co-authors, and doctoral students for which editor served as committee chair. After papers are assigned, individual editors are required to inform the managing editor of any conflicts not included in the list above. In the event that none of the editors satisfy all of the conflict screens, co-editors who are least conflicted will be assigned to the manuscript. In addition, co-editors who are least conflicted are assigned for all paper submissions by sitting editors. Journal submissions are also assigned to referees to minimize conflicts of interest. After papers are assigned, referees are asked to inform the editor of any conflicts that may exist.

4. Correction, Retraction, Withdrawal Policy

(A) Corrections

• Before publications: A copy (PDF) as Galley proofs are sent to the concerned author/authors for proofreading and corrections are performed before the PDF’s are sent for final printing process.
• Post Publishing: Corrections can be published if the publication data/record is seriously affected with regard to the accuracy/reliability of published information. Under Corrections and addendum subsequent issue as Corrections may be published.

(B) Retractions

• The Retraction Policy of the Indian Journal of Forestry is adopted by the rules and standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The article will be retracted in cases such as plagiarism, multiple submission, unauthentic information or duplicitous use of data. A retraction is a public declaration made about an earlier statement that cancels, withdraws, contradiction or reverses the original statement or terminates and abstains from publishing the original statement. The retraction may be performed by the editors of a journal, or by the concerned author(s) of the papers (or their affiliation). The editors may consult experts/reviewers for their suggestions/comments. An alteration that changes the main theme of the original works is generally referred to as a retraction while an alteration that leaves the main point of a statement intact is usually referred to simply as a correction. It is determined by circumstances, either a retraction or correction is the suitable remedy.

(C) Withdrawal Policy

• Sometimes few of the authors request withdrawal of manuscript from the publication process after submission or after publication. In some instances, the request for withdrawal is made when the manuscript is only a few days away from publication in the journal. This may cause the time waste by the editors, reviewers, and the editorial staff. To withdraw an Article, a formal request has to be made by the Corresponding Author. Withdrawn means that the article is archived in our database and not further acted upon. Articles which have not been published yet but represent early versions of articles, are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors may be “Withdrawn” from our group Journals.

5. Ethical Responsibilities of Editors

• The editor is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal will be published.
• The editor will evaluate manuscripts irrespective to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy.
• The decision will be based on the paper’s importance, originality and clarity, and the study’s validity and its relevance to the journal's scope.
• Editor must ensure that each manuscript is initially evaluated by the editor for originality. After passing this, the manuscript is forwarded to two reviewers for double-blind peer review, each of whom will make a recommendation to accept, reject, or modify the manuscript. The review period will be up to 30 days.
• The editor must ensure that information regarding manuscript submitted by an author is kept confidential. The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, and potential reviewers, as appropriate.
• Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.

6. Ethical Responsibilities of Reviewers

• Peer review is an essential component of formal scholarly communication, and lies at the heart of the scientific method. The peer-reviewing process assists the editor and the editorial board in making editorial decisions and assist the author in improving the paper through the editorial communications with the author.
• Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and withdraw from the review process, so that the manuscript could be sent to another reviewer.
• Any manuscript received for review must be treated as confidential document. It must not be disclosed to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.
• Review of submitted manuscript should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
• Manuscript reviewers must ensure that authors have acknowledged all sources of data used in the research. Reviewers should identify cases in which relevant published work referred to in the paper has not been cited by the authors in the reference section.
• Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author.
• The reviewers’ professional, objective and thorough review process will contribute to the quality of work and enhance the quality of published research. The quality of the work includes originality of subject or application, appropriateness of methods, accuracy of mathematical equations and computations, validity of conclusions, organization of subject matter, clarity and communicational competence, so to be acceptable a manuscript must make a worthwhile and significant contribution to the advancement of knowledge.

7. Peer Review Integrity and Policy

Every article published in a BSMPS journal has been through peer review process. This means that its quality, validity, and relevance have been assessed by independent peers within the field.

We believe in the integrity of peer review, all published articles in our journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening, anonymous refereeing by independent expert referees, and consequent revision by article authors when required.

Our Journals follow double-blind review model, in this model, the reviewers don’t know any details of the author of the article. And the authors don’t know who the reviewers are either.

Many researchers prefer double-anonymous review because they believe it will give their paper a fairer chance than single-anonymous. It can avoid the risk of a paper suffering from the unintended bias of reviewers who know the seniority, gender, or nationality of a paper’s author.

8. Plagiarism Policy

Plagiarism (Literary theft) can range from the unreferenced utilization of others' published and unpublished ideas, thoughts such as in research funding applications, to the presentation of a complete article by the “new” names of authors with changing language / different way. Plagiarism accidental or intentional, is still plagiarism and may be find any point throughout the planning, research, writing, or publishing process in both print and electronic versions of research publication.

Indian Journal of Forestry will judge any case of plagiarism on its limits. All Manuscripts submitted to this journal may also be checked using ‘plagiarism’ checking system by Cross Checking Software iThenticate. If plagiarism is perceived by the reviewer, editor, editorial board member, etc., in any stage of article publication process- before or after approval then we will inform/alert regarding plagiarism to the concerned author(s) and will ask them to modify/rewrite the manuscript/contents or to cite the references properly from where the text/content has been taken.

The article may be rejected if the text similarity is more than 20%, if the matching text is one continuous block of borrowed material, it will be considered as plagiarized text of significant concern. On the other hand, text similarity due to the usage of common terminologies and method related details in ‘Methodology’ part of a manuscript should not raise a serious ethical concern.

9. Editorial independence Policy

Editorial independence Policy At BSMPS we follow a strict policy of editorial independence we value intellectual freedom and independent editorial decisions, and believe strongly in ensuring that we keep the editorial decision making processes of our publications completely separate from our commercial interests.

Safeguarding this editorial independence requires that all editorial decisions, or concerns or complaints about editorial decisions are dealt with strictly within the editorial structures of a publication. These structures typically include editors, editors-in-chief, editorial boards or review boards for the editorial governance of any given publication.

The following Statement of Principle speaks to a core BSMPS value of intellectual freedom and independent editorial decisions:

The journal editors and publishers will always work together on the business of managing a particular journal, and share duties and responsibilities but no one on the commercial or executive side of the business can get involved in, interfere with, or even comment on editorial decisions under any circumstances.

Advertising Policy

• All advertisements are subject to the approval of the Publisher Messers Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh (BSMPS), which reserves the right to reject or cancel any ad at any time.
• All advertisements are accepted and published by Publisher on the warranty of the agency and advertiser that both are authorized to publish the entire contents and subject matter of the advertisement.
• In consideration of publication of an advertisement, the advertiser and the agency, jointly and severally, agree to indemnify and hold harmless Publisher, its officers, agents and employees against expenses (including legal fees) and losses resulting from the publication of the contents of the advertisement, including, without limitation, claims or suits for libel, violation of privacy, copyright infringement or plagiarism.
• Publisher will not be liable for any failure to publish any advertisement accepted by Publisher; however, Publisher shall use its reasonable efforts to place such advertisement in subsequent available space.
• All advertisements must clearly and prominently identify the advertiser by trademark or signature.
• Any references to Publisher or its products or services in advertisements, promotional material, or merchandising by the advertiser or agency are subject to Publisher’s written approval for such use.
• All advertising contract position clauses are treated as requests. Publisher cannot guarantee fixed positioning.
• Publisher is not responsible for incidental or consequential damage for errors in displaying or printing an advertisement.
• Publisher may change the terms set forth herein at any time, provided that no such change applies to ads whose closing date precedes the announcement of the change.
• Publisher will not be bound by any condition, printed or otherwise, appearing on any insertion order or copy instructions when such conditions conflict with the conditions.
• In the event of non-payment, Publisher reserves the right to hold advertiser and/or its advertising agency jointly and severally liable for such moneys as are past due and payable to Publisher.
• Advertiser represents and warrants that all advertisements they advertise are compliant with all applicable laws, rules, and regulations in the country where the advertisement will be seen.
• DIGITAL ADS: Any use of copyrighted material for links to and from Publisher’s website must be approved in advance by Publisher. Any unauthorized linking is prohibited. Publisher does not endorse or support any product or organization linked to its website, nor is Publisher responsible for the content of any website promoted in an advertisment. The use by advertiser or its agency of pixels, beacons, cookies, tracking tags, or similar technology in advertising creative for the purpose of collecting personally identifiable information is prohibited.

Privacy Policy & Statement

At Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh (BSMPS), we understand the importance of protecting any personal information that we collect from our authors, reviewers, editors and anyone who engages with our products and services.

When you submit or review a manuscript in a publication that is published by us, your name, email address, affiliation, and other contact details the publication might require will be used for the regular operations of the publication. This includes sharing data with partners involved in the production and publication process of the manuscript. We will not use your contact details for marketing purposes unless you have explicitly agreed to receive these types of communications.

We have practices in place to ensure that steps are taken to maintain the security, integrity, and privacy of the personal data collected and processed.

Please note- our partners, including societies, will have their own policies and practices in place.

Privacy Statement

BSMPS Portal does not automatically capture any specific personal information from you, (like name, phone number or e-mail address, credit card or debit card details and password etc.), that allows us to identify you individually.

If the BSMPS Portal requests you to provide personal information, you will be informed for the particular purposes for which the information is gathered and adequate security measures will be taken to protect your personal information.

We do not sell or share any personally identifiable information to any third party (public/private). Any information provided to this Portal will be protected from loss, misuse, unauthorized access or disclosure, alteration, or destruction.

This privacy policy describes how we handle your personal information. We collect, use, and share personal information to help the functionality of the Portal and to keep it safe (details below). In formal terms, BSMPS, acting itself and through its subsidiaries, is the "data controller" of your personal information. This policy is effective 15/09/2021

Making a Purchase

In order to purchase Journal/ articles and/or related services through our Portal, you must provide us with certain Personal Information such as your name, credit card number and expiration date, credit card billing address, telephone number, email address and the name or names of the person(s).

Member Registration

If you choose to become a registered member of the Portal, you must provide your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, a unique login name, password, and password validation. This information is collected on the registration form for several reasons.

Use

We use users' personal information to:

• Provide our services (Subscription of journal, articles or other information).
• Resolve disputes, collect fees, and troubleshoot problems.
• Encourage safe trading and enforce our policies.
• Customize users' experience, measure interest in our services, and inform users about services and updates.
• Communicate marketing and promotional offers to you (If explicitly agreed to receive).
• Do other things for users as described when we collect the information.

Disclosure

The users’ privacy is very important to us. We do not and shall not at any point in time, either sell or rent users’ personal information to third parties without users’ explicit consent.

We may be required from time to time to disclose users’ personal information to Governmental or law enforcing agencies or our regulators, but we will only do so under proper authority.

BSMPS also reserves the right to make use of the personal information in any investigation or judicial process relating to fraud on account of such transactions during the period BSMPS retains such information.

We may also disclose personal information to enforce our policies, respond to claims that a posting or other content violates other’s rights, or protects anyone’s rights, property or safety.

We may also share personal information with:

• Corporate affiliates who help detect or prevent potentially illegal acts and provide joint services (Our corporate affiliates will market only to users who ask them to).
• Service providers who help with our business operations.

(A) Using Information from BSMPS

• You may use personal information gathered from BSMPS only to follow up with another user about a specific posting, not to send spam/ phishing or collect personal information from someone who hasn't agreed to that.

(B) Access, Modification and Deletion

• You can see, modify or erase your personal information by reviewing your posting or account status page. Contact customer support to review any personal information we store that is not available on our website. We delete personal information when we no longer need it for the purposes we described earlier. We retain personal information as permitted by law to resolve disputes and to enforce our policies.

(C) Data Security

• We use a number of mechanisms (encryption, passwords, physical security) to protect the security and integrity of your personal information against unauthorized access and disclosure. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. So while we strive to protect such information, we cannot warrant the security of any information you transmit to us and you do so at your own risk. Once any personal information comes into our possession, we will take reasonable steps to protect that information from misuse and loss and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

(D) Confidentiality of Information

• Users who use any of the features on the Portal agrees and accept that they have been fully informed by BSMPS that the use of features may lead to publication, to all users of the Portal, of any personal information posted by them while using any specific feature on the Portal. Users further agree that the authenticity of, and consequences from the posting by users of any personal information of themselves or any other person, are the sole responsibility of the user. Users further agree and accept that the terms of the Privacy Policy will be applicable to the use of all features, existing and new. However, the Users agree and accept that confidentiality of information posted on such features has been waived by the Users of such features themselves.

(E) General

• We may update, upgrade, modify (partially &/or fully) this policy at any time, with updates taking effect when you next post or after 30 days, whichever is sooner.

Cookie Policy

Our websites use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our site. This helps us to provide you with a good, more personalised experience when you browse our websites and also allows us to improve our sites.

(A) What is a Cookie?

A Cookie is a small text file that is downloaded onto your device when you visit a website. The next time you visit that website, your device checks to see if it has a cookie that is relevant and sends the information contained in that cookie back to that website.

(B) Why do we use them?

We use cookies for a number of reasons, such as:

• Identify you as a returning visitor to our websites and remember your preferences, in order to give you a better, more personalized experience.
• Analyze how you use our websites.
• Identify errors with the websites and resolve them.
• Identify you as a returning visitor to our websites and remember your preferences, in order to give you a better, more personalized experience;rmal">analyze the performance of our websites.
• To analyze how well our websites are performing.
• Remember items in your shopping cart.
• Build a profile of your interests in order to show you relevant adverts for our products and services.
• Combine your web behavior data with personal data that you have previously provided to us.

(C) How do I manage my cookie preferences?

The privacy settings in your browser will enable you to customize your cookie settings, including deletion and disabling them. Typically, you will find the controls under the browser's ‘Options' or ‘Preferences' menu.

Changing your cookie settings, including deleting and disabling them, may mean that the functionality of our websites and your ability to use some of their features is affected. You will still be able visit our websites, but you may not be able to access all of their content and some of the functions may not operate correctly.

For information on the use of cookies in mobile phone and other device browsers and for details on how to reject or delete such cookies, please refer to your device user manual.

Web Policy

All contents of this portal including all graphics, texts, images and software or any other contents of this portal is protected by the copyright, trade mark or any property rights owned by Messers Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh (BSMPS), unless otherwise indicated.

No part or parts of this portal may be copied, displayed or reproduced in any other portals or used in any other type of electronic public or private data downloading system or any other services without prior written consent of BSMPS.

The contents of this portal was produced to provide users of this portal with general information and shall not be used as a stand-in of legal advices.

The contents of this portal is deemed correct and is being updated on the date as displayed on the homepage of this portal.

Due care has been taken in providing the information in this portal and BSMPS will not be responsible for any discrepancies and impreciseness of the information in this portal.

The latest version of any documents in this portal is similar to that of its original documentation filed by FRIM.

No part of this portal is allowed to be linked to any other portal without the prior written consent of BSMPS.

BSMPS shall not be held responsible any contents of any portal linked to this portal, or any changes made to such linked portals.

Copyright Policy

Copyright Policy

In order for BSMPS to publish and disseminate research articles, we need certain publishing rights from authors, which are determined by a publishing agreement between the author and BSMPS. We are committed to protect and defend the authors’ works and their reputation. We take allegations of infringement, plagiarism, ethical disputes, and fraud very seriously.

For articles published under the subscription model, the authors transfer copyright to BSMPS.

However the authors can enjoy many rights under our publishing agreement, which support their need to share, disseminate and maximize the impact of their research.

Author Rights

The below table explains the rights that authors have when they publish with BSMPS.

These apply to the corresponding author and all co-authors.

Author rights in BSMPS proprietary journals which follow the subscription Model

1	Retain patent and trademark rights	Yes
2	Receive proper attribution and credit for their published work	Yes
3	Re-use their own material in following new works without permission (with full acknowledgement of the original article): 1. Extend an article to book length 2. Include an article in a subsequent compilation of their own work 3. Re-use portions, excerpts, and their own figures or tables in other works.	Yes
4	Use and share their works for scholarly purposes (with full acknowledgement of the original article): 1. In their own classroom teaching. 2. If an author is speaking at a conference, they can present the article. 3. Include in a thesis or dissertation (provided this is not published commercially). 4. Share copies of their article privately as part of an invitation-only work group on commercial sites with which the publisher has a hosting agreement	Yes
5	Publicly share the Article Bibliographical details including Abstract on any website or repository at any time.	Yes
6	Publicly share the final published article, for example on ResearchGate or Academia.edu	No
7	Retain copyright	No

Digital preservation policy

As a publisher in scholarly research, higher education and professional development, we at BSMPS recognises the roles of both librarian and publisher as custodian of scholarly content, and are committed to the preservation of the scholarship in its research for generations to come.

Presently we are maintaining our own state of the art digital archive, were we make daily back-up of the files in our server to ensure that accurate digital version of all manuscripts and articles can be recovered at any moment in case of accident we also deposits publications in multiple digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation, long time registration of domain and webhosting policy is in place and active.

Jurisdiction

The jurisdiction for all disputes concerning submitted articles, published material, advertisement, subscription and sale will be at courts/tribunals in Dehradun, India.