JMVRA and UGC's Suggested Parameters, Point by Point

For many years, among Indian academics, “peer-reviewed” served as shorthand for “safe to publish in” — one badge that was supposed to check a journal's credibility on your behalf. That shorthand has vanished in the form most researchers recall. UGC's Public Notice of 16 July 2025, which confirmed an earlier notice of 11 February 2025, officially ended the UGC-CARE list. What followed asks more of a journal, in some respects, than a fixed list ever did: a published group of Suggestive Parameters that any researcher can apply to any journal personally, without waiting for a yearly update of the list. Applying them yourself takes little time.

This page exists because that change alters what “is this journal legitimate?” really asks. The question is no longer “is it on the list.” It is “does it do what a credible peer-reviewed journal should do”: genuine ISSN registration, a real and disclosed review process, an identifiable editorial team, transparent fees, and permanent archiving backed by a DOI for each article. Each section above takes these points in turn for JMVRA, linking to the policy page that supports every claim.

Applying This Checklist to Any Journal, Not Only JMVRA

The eighteen points above are not marketing criteria specific to JMVRA. They form a general method for distinguishing a real journal from a cloned or predatory one, and they work for any journal you are weighing up, not only this one. A journal that cannot show a verifiable ISSN, refuses to name its editorial board, or reveals its fee only after acceptance has already failed the check, whatever badge it says it holds.

A quick pass through this check needs roughly fifteen minutes. Look the ISSN up on the official portal, run a recent article's DOI through Crossref, put the article title into Google Scholar, study the actual peer review policy rather than a one-line summary, and confirm that the entire fee is public before you submit anything. JMVRA's own guide to recognising a predatory journal explains the same routine in greater depth.

What "Transparent Peer Review" Really Means at JMVRA

Transparency in peer review involves more than simply running a review, since many low-quality journals run a token review and still publish nearly everything. It means authors can see how a decision came about: the stage their manuscript has reached, the number of reviewers who assessed it, and what those reviewers actually wrote, instead of a bare accept or reject. JMVRA's five-stage process — initial screening, similarity verification, double-blind expert review, revision and author response, and final acceptance — is set out in full in the Peer Review Policy, and at each stage authors get the anonymised reviewer comments together with the editorial decision.

Why a "minimum of two reviewers" is the threshold that counts

One reviewer gives one person's judgement, while two independent reviewers who reach the same conclusion offer corroboration. JMVRA keeps a panel of 3000+ subject-matter reviewers precisely so that two properly qualified experts in the right subject can be found for nearly any submission in any discipline it accepts. Independent assessment of this kind also protects authors from the bias of a single opinion.

Fee Transparency: Why the Amount Must Be Known Before Submission

The most frequent complaint about disreputable journals is not that they charge a fee, since open access publishing legitimately has running costs. The complaint is that the fee turns up only once a paper is already accepted, when the author has the least power to walk away. JMVRA states its whole fee — ₹971 INR for Indian authors, $41 USD for foreign authors — on a dedicated Publication Charges Policy, and any visitor can produce an exact itemised total in the Cost Calculator without opening an account or submitting anything.

Why CC BY 4.0 Rules Out "All Rights Reserved"

Under JMVRA's Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, authors keep the full copyright in their work, and JMVRA obtains just a non-exclusive right to publish it. This is a specific legal statement that can be checked, not a marketing phrase, and it explains why JMVRA's content is never labelled "all rights reserved": that phrase is the exact opposite of what CC BY grants. Read Author Rights & Open Access Licence for precisely what you may do with your own published paper.

Where JMVRA Is Still Improving

A page like this is useful only if it is candid about weaknesses as well as strengths. The one gap JMVRA acknowledges against the fuller international standard (a gap it shares with DOAJ's own Principles of Transparency) is formal third-party dark archiving, meaning participation in a preservation service such as CLOCKSS, LOCKSS or Portico, which keeps articles available even if a publisher's own infrastructure vanishes completely. JMVRA's articles are hosted permanently and are never removed, yet that assurance depends for now on JMVRA continuing to operate, a narrower assurance than third-party dark archiving gives. Saying so openly is itself part of following the transparency standard that underlies this page.