Why IJRTI Is Considered UGC CARE Approved Journal Publication Under the New UGC Framework

For years, "UGC CARE approved" functioned as shorthand for "safe to publish in" among Indian academics — a single badge that supposedly did the work of checking a journal's credibility for you. That shorthand no longer exists in the form most researchers remember it. UGC's Public Notice of 16 July 2025, confirming an earlier notice of 11 February 2025, formally discontinued the UGC-CARE list. What replaced it is, in some ways, more demanding of a journal than a static list ever was: a published set of Suggestive Parameters that any researcher can check against any journal, for themselves, without waiting for an annual list update.

This page exists because that shift changes what "is this journal legitimate?" actually means. It no longer means "is it on the list." It means "does it actually do the things a credible peer-reviewed journal is supposed to do" — genuine ISSN registration, a real and disclosed review process, an identifiable editorial team, transparent fees, and permanent, DOI-backed archiving. Every section above walks through those things for IJRTI specifically, with links to the actual policy page behind each claim.

Using This Checklist on Any Journal, Not Just IJRTI

The eighteen points above aren't IJRTI-specific marketing criteria — they're a general-purpose method for telling a real journal from a cloned or predatory one, and they work on any journal you're considering, not just this one. A journal that can't produce a verifiable ISSN, won't name its editorial board, or discloses its fee only after acceptance has already failed the check regardless of what badge it claims to hold.

The quickest version of this check takes about fifteen minutes: look up the ISSN on the official portal, search a recent article's DOI on Crossref, search the article title on Google Scholar, read the actual peer review policy rather than a one-line summary, and confirm the full fee is published before you submit anything. IJRTI's own guide to recognising a predatory journal covers this same routine in more depth.

What "Transparent Peer Review" Actually Means at IJRTI

Transparency in peer review isn't just about running a review at all — plenty of low-quality journals run a nominal review and still publish almost everything. It means the author can see how the decision was reached: which stage the manuscript is at, how many reviewers assessed it, and what they actually said, not just an accept or reject verdict. IJRTI's five-stage process — initial screening, similarity verification, double-blind expert review, revision and author response, and final acceptance — is documented in full in the Peer Review Policy, and authors receive the anonymised reviewer comments alongside the editorial decision at every stage.

Why "minimum two reviewers" is the meaningful threshold

A single reviewer's opinion is one person's judgement; two independent reviewers reaching the same conclusion is corroboration. IJRTI's panel of 3000+ subject-matter reviewers exists specifically so that two genuinely qualified, subject-appropriate experts can be found for almost any submission across any discipline IJRTI accepts.

Fee Transparency: Why the Number Has to Come Before the Submission

The single most common complaint about disreputable journals isn't that they charge a fee — open access publishing legitimately costs money to run. It's that the fee appears only after a paper has already been accepted, when an author has the least leverage to walk away. IJRTI publishes its complete fee — ₹599 for Indian authors, $40 USD for international authors — on a dedicated Publication Charges Policy and lets any visitor generate an exact, itemised total on the Cost Calculator without creating an account or submitting anything.

Licensing: Why CC BY 4.0 and "All Rights Reserved" Cannot Coexist

Under IJRTI's Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, authors keep full copyright of their own work; IJRTI receives only a non-exclusive right to publish. That is a specific, checkable legal claim, not a marketing phrase — and it means IJRTI's content is never marked "all rights reserved," since that phrase is the literal opposite of what a CC BY licence grants. See Author Rights & Open Access Licence for exactly what this allows you to do with your own published paper.

Where IJRTI Is Still Developing

A page like this one is only useful if it's honest about gaps, not just strengths. IJRTI's one acknowledged gap against the fuller international standard (shared with DOAJ's own Principles of Transparency) is formal third-party dark archiving — participation in a preservation service like CLOCKSS, LOCKSS or Portico, which guarantees articles remain accessible even if a publisher's own infrastructure disappears entirely. IJRTI's articles are permanently hosted and never taken down, but that guarantee currently depends on IJRTI's continued operation, which is a narrower guarantee than third-party dark archiving provides. Stating that plainly is itself part of following the same transparency standard this page is built around.