Policies and credentials

This page is the complete governance record of Moyan Journal of Community & Society — the identifiers that name us, and the policies that bind us. It is written to the standards expected of an international scholarly journal: COPE Core Practices, ICMJE authorship criteria, the Declaration of Helsinki, and DOAJ transparency principles.

Where a credential has not been issued to us yet, this page says so and names the registry responsible. We publish no identifier we do not hold and claim no index we do not appear in — that restraint is itself part of the credential.

Journal identifiers of record

ISSN (electronic): —; Application in preparation with the ISSN National Centre for India (NISCPR, CSIR), New Delhi. Until an ISSN is issued we do not display one, and no placeholder number appears anywhere on this site. Registry
Persistent article identifier (DOI): —; Crossref membership is planned for Volume 1. Until DOIs are minted, every article, finding and statistic has a permanent canonical URL under journal.moyanai.app that we commit not to move or delete; superseded pages will redirect rather than 404. Registry
Publisher: Moyan AI, India; Sole publisher and host of the journal. No content is licensed to a third-party paywall.
Research affiliation: Community Leadership and Social Change Program Research Scholars, Department of Graduate Institute, DHI University (DHIU), India; All studies are designed, fielded, coded and written by this research unit. The publisher does not commission findings or edit conclusions.
Publication frequency: Two issues per year (continuous online publication); Articles are published as soon as they clear review; issues are compiled twice yearly.
Language: English, with Malayalam instruments and bilingual summaries; Field instruments are administered in English and Malayalam.
Contact of record: communityjournaldhiu@gmail.com; Editorial office address for submissions, corrections, complaints and data requests.
Author identifiers (ORCID): —; ORCID iDs are being registered for named editors and scholars and will be printed against each byline once verified. We will not display an unverified iD. Registry

Research affiliation of record: Community Leadership and Social Change Program Research Scholars, Department of Graduate Institute, DHI University (DHIU), India.

Peer review policy

Editorial review plus independent data verification. We describe exactly what we do rather than claiming a standard we do not meet.

Every submission is screened by the chief editor for scope, ethics and data availability before review begins.
Manuscripts are then reviewed by at least two members of the review board who did not participate in fieldwork or drafting.
Review is single-anonymised: reviewers know the authors, authors do not receive reviewer names.
Technical editors independently recompute every published percentage from the raw response tables; a figure that cannot be reproduced is not published.
Reviewers must decline where a conflict of interest exists; the chief editor recuses from decisions on work she or he co-authored, and an associate editor takes the decision instead.
We do not currently operate external double-blind peer review, and we say so on every article rather than implying otherwise.
Typical time from submission to first decision: four weeks.

Publication ethics and malpractice statement

Aligned with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices and the ICMJE recommendations on authorship.

Editors decide solely on scholarly merit, methodological soundness and relevance to scope — never on the identity, faith, gender, politics or institution of the authors.
Fabrication, falsification, image or data manipulation, plagiarism, and salami-slicing of a single dataset into redundant papers are grounds for rejection or retraction.
Allegations of misconduct are investigated using the relevant COPE flowchart; the corresponding author is given the opportunity to respond in writing before any decision.
Editors, reviewers and staff treat submitted material as confidential and must not use unpublished data for their own work.
Where an editor is the subject of an allegation, the matter is referred to the research ethics contact at the author institution.

Research ethics and informed consent

Human-participant research follows the Declaration of Helsinki and the ICMR National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical and Health Research (2017) as adapted for social research.

Participation is voluntary, unpaid and revocable; respondents may abandon the instrument at any point and no partial response is retained without submission.
Consent is obtained on the first screen of the instrument in the respondent's language, stating purpose, publisher, data use and the open licence applied to aggregate results.
No names, phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses or device identifiers are collected alongside responses, so responses cannot be re-identified.
Sensitive attributes — religion, income, mental health — always carry an explicit 'prefer not to say' option, and non-response is reported rather than imputed.
Respondents under 18 are included only with the consent language approved for minors and are never asked identifying questions.
Ethical oversight for fieldwork sits with the research programme at the author institution; requests for the consent text and instrument are answered in full.

Authorship and contributorship

ICMJE-style criteria, with a CRediT contribution statement on every study.

Authorship requires substantial contribution to design, collection or analysis; drafting or critical revision; approval of the final version; and accountability for the work.
Contributions that do not meet all four criteria — field assistance, translation, transcription — are named in acknowledgements, not on the byline.
Ghost authorship, gift authorship and honorary authorship are prohibited.
Corporate authorship by the research unit is used where an instrument is collectively fielded; individual contributors are still listed in the CRediT statement.
Changes to the author list after submission require written agreement from every listed author.

Use of generative AI

AI may assist with language; it may not author, review or generate data. Any use is disclosed.

Generative AI tools cannot be listed as an author — they cannot take responsibility for the work.
Permitted uses (copy-editing, translation checking, code assistance for tabulation) must be disclosed in the article's AI-use statement, naming the tool and version.
Generating, imputing, extrapolating or 'illustrating' survey responses with AI is prohibited without exception.
Reviewers must not upload manuscripts under review into third-party AI services, as this breaches confidentiality.

Plagiarism and originality screening

Every manuscript is screened before review and again before publication.

Submissions are checked with similarity-detection software; excluding references and quoted instrument text, a similarity index above 15% is returned to the authors.
Verbatim reuse of any length without quotation marks and citation is treated as plagiarism regardless of the index.
Self-plagiarism, including republishing tables from an earlier study without citation, is treated the same way.
Submission implies the work is original, is not under consideration elsewhere, and that all figures reproduced from other sources carry permission.

Conflicts of interest and funding

Declared on every article, including the absence of a conflict.

Authors declare all financial and non-financial interests: funding, employment, consultancies, political office, and personal relationships relevant to the subject.
All funding sources are named with grant numbers where applicable; studies published to date are funded internally by the publisher and the research programme, with no external sponsor.
No sponsor, advertiser or government body has any role in study design, analysis, interpretation or the decision to publish.
Editors and reviewers declare competing interests and recuse themselves where one exists.
The journal carries no advertising and accepts no sponsored content.

Open access, copyright and charges

Diamond open access: free to read, free to publish, CC BY 4.0.

All content is published immediately under a CC BY 4.0 licence — reuse, translation, remixing and commercial use are permitted with attribution and a link.
Authors retain copyright in their work; the journal takes a licence to publish, not ownership.
There are no article processing charges, submission fees, page charges or colour charges. There is no subscription, paywall or registration wall.
Authors may deposit the published version in any institutional or subject repository immediately, with no embargo.
Readers may text- and data-mine the full corpus; machine-readable crawlers are explicitly allowed in robots.txt.

Data availability and reproducibility

Every published number must be recomputable by a reader from released tables.

Aggregate response tables for each study are published on the open-data page alongside the article, with base sizes for every figure.
Row-level microdata is not released: responses are anonymous and un-linkable, and release could enable re-identification in small subgroups.
Any cross-tabulation not already published is supplied on request to the editorial address, free of charge.
Field instruments, question wording and coding rules are published in full on the methodology page.
Percentages are reported unrounded to one decimal where they carry weight, and base sizes below 50 are flagged as indicative rather than estimative.

Corrections, retractions and versioning

Following COPE retraction guidelines. Nothing is silently edited.

Typographical fixes that do not change meaning are made in place and logged with a date.
Any change to a number, chart or conclusion is published as a dated correction notice on the article page, stating the previous value and the reason.
Articles with unreliable findings — through error or misconduct — are retracted with a standing retraction notice; the original text stays online, watermarked, so the record is auditable.
Expressions of concern are issued where an investigation is open but not concluded.
Corrections may be requested by anyone at the editorial address; we acknowledge within five working days.

Digital preservation and archiving

Content must survive the publisher.

Every published page is submitted to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on publication.
The full site, article text and aggregate data tables are held in a version-controlled repository with off-site backups.
Participation in a distributed preservation network (CLOCKSS / PKP PN) is planned alongside ISSN registration.
Should the journal cease publication, the entire corpus will be released as a static archive under the same open licence.

Indexing and discoverability

We list only what is true today, and state plainly what has been applied for. No journal should claim an index it does not hold.

Currently discoverable through Google, Google Scholar and Bing via structured ScholarlyArticle and Dataset metadata on every page, plus a complete XML sitemap.
Applications to DOAJ, Crossref and ROAD follow ISSN assignment; each has a minimum publication history requirement we are working through openly.
We do not appear in Scopus or Web of Science and make no claim to. Any site stating otherwise on our behalf is wrong.
Predatory-publishing safeguards: no solicitation emails, no fee for publication, named editors with verifiable affiliations, and no promise of guaranteed acceptance or fast-track review for payment.

Complaints and appeals

A documented route that does not end with the person complained about.

Complaints about editorial process, publication ethics or conduct go to the editorial address marked 'Complaint'; we acknowledge within five working days and respond substantively within thirty.
Authors may appeal a rejection once, in writing, addressing the reviewers' points; an editor not involved in the original decision handles the appeal.
If the complainant is unsatisfied, the matter is escalated to the research programme leadership at the author institution.

Reader privacy

Reading research should not be surveilled.

No advertising trackers, no third-party marketing pixels and no sale of reader data.
Analytics are aggregate and carry no cross-site identifier.
Correspondence sent to the editorial address is used only to answer that correspondence.

Editorial office

Submissions, corrections, complaints, data requests and permission enquiries: communityjournaldhiu@gmail.com. Editors are named and contactable on the editorial board page; scope and review practice are described in about the journal.