Focus and Scope

Journal of mountain area research (J. mt. area res.) is an academic journal supervised by Karakoram International University, Gilgit, Pakistan.
J. mt. area res. is an annual international peer-reviewed journal publishing original full length research articles, review papers and letters/short communications on a broad range of Mathematical and Physical Sciences fields, and will accept papers in  mathematical sciences, materials sciences, physics, chemistry and Earth sciences. The journal was completely multidisciplinary earlier, from 2019 onwards the scope of journal has been limited only to Mathematical and Physical sciences areas mentioned above.

Journal policy

The journal policy is to publish only original research work, therefore J. mt. area res. does not wish to receive any paper that has already been reported in parts or contains already published text, data, figures, tables or other illustrations or any copyright materials whatsoever that has been submitted or accepted for publication either in a journal or conference proceedings elsewhere in any form.  Misconduct in research papers, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication is unacceptable to this journal, and will be strongly discouraged. All submissions will be checked for plagiarism, any manuscript that contains redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar research work violates the policies of this journal and will be rejected. This journal follows the guidelines of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) for dealing with the cases of research misconduct.

Publication Ethics
GENERAL
Journal of Mountain Area Research abides by the guidelines produced by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).  In particular, authors should not submit manuscripts that contain previously published results, plagiarised material, fictitious results, or intentional reference omissions.

Authors should disclose related manuscripts that are under consideration or in press elsewhere, describing their relationship to the submitted manuscript and providing copies preferably at submission, and in any case upon request.

Authors should not submit manuscripts reporting essentially the same research to multiple journals. In addition, authors should not intentionally fragment research into multiple manuscripts if a single report would be more appropriate.

Breaches of these guidelines may result in the loss of publication privileges in the journal.
Please contact the editorial office with any questions on ethics or authorship.
SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT ISSUES
Any alleged violation of any of the rules of scientific publishing ethics as defined by the Committee on Publication Ethics will be investigated confidentially. 

If the violations are found to be sufficiently serious, the Editor-in-Chief will request that the authors provide a written explanation. If the authors do not provide an explanation or the explanation is unsatisfactory, such that the journal's Editorial Team finds that the evidence clearly shows that a violation of our publishing ethics policy has occurred, the manuscript will be rejected or retracted, depending on current status.

In such cases the Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to both notify the authors' institution of the violation of the journal's scientific ethics policy and impose punitive actions, e.g., a ban on publishing in the journal. The above course of action will also take effect if it is established that authors have violated any of the basic rules of ethical scientific conduct.
AUTHORSHIP
Credit for authorship should be based on:

 -  substantial contributions to research design;
 -  the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data, drafting the paper or critically revising it;
 -  approval of the submitted and final versions.

 Authors should meet all three criteria. All contributors who do not meet all the criteria for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgement section. In order to guarantee that appropriate authorship credit is given to all contributors we request that a brief but exhaustive statement describing the contribution of every listed author is added to the manuscript, after the conclusion and before the references.

 The corresponding author should take responsibility for communicating with all other authors and getting their approval for the final version to be published. Given the fact that editors are, in general, not in a position to determine whether or not claims of contested authorship are valid, J. mt. area res. will not allow, under any circumstances, changes in authorship (additions or removal) after acceptance of a manuscript. Changes in the order in which authors are listed are allowed after acceptance, subject to editorial approval. Please also note that retractions over matters of contested authorship, if the data in the manuscript is sound, are not allowed, as per COPE guidelines.
OWNERSHIP
Authors must declare that the submitted work is their own and that copyright has not been breached in seeking its publication.
ORIGINALITY
Authors should declare that the submitted work has not previously been published in full, and is not being considered for publication, elsewhere. Publication of abstracts and presentations at scientific meetings will not jeopardise full publication.
ANIMAL STUDIES
For detailed reporting of animal experimentation the ARRIVE guidelines should be followed. Such manuscripts must include a statement in the Experimental Section or in a separate Ethical Statement that permission was obtained from the relevant national or local authorities. The institutional committees that have approved the experiments must be identified and the accreditation number of the laboratory or of the investigator given where applicable. If no such rules or permissions are in place in the country where the research/experiments were performed, then this must also be clearly stated in the manuscript.
HUMAN STUDIES/SUBJECTS AND CLINICAL SAMPLES
For manuscripts containing experiments (including the testing of sensor/wearable technologies) with human subjects or tissue samples (including blood or sweat) from human subjects, a statement regarding appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB)/Ethical Committee approval must be included in the manuscript. The informed consent of all participating subjects (or next of kin when appropriate) must be obtained and a statement to indicate this must also be included. Confirmation that the study conforms to recognized standards, such as the Declaration of Helsinki, is required.

When reporting phase II and III clinical trials, reporting on tumour marker studies or describing human biospecimens, authors should refer, respectively, to the relevant CONSORT statementREMARK or BRISQ guidelines. Prospective clinical trials must be registered in www.clinicaltrials.gov (or a similar public repository that matches the criteria established by ICMJE) prior to the start of patient enrolment. Trial registration numbers must be reported in the manuscript.
COMPETING FINANCIAL INTERESTS AND CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
J. mt. area res. requires that all authors disclose any potential sources of conflict of interest. Any interest or relationship, financial or otherwise, that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript. Potential sources of conflict of interest include, but are not limited to, patent or stock ownership, membership of a company board of directors, membership of an advisory board or committee for a company, and consultancy for, or receipt of, speaker's fees from a company. The existence of a conflict of interest does not preclude publication.
As a consequence:

 - authors must provide details of competing financial interests in any company or institution that might benefit from their publication;
 - if authors have no conflict of interest to declare, this must be stated upon submission;
 - it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively to disclose with the submission ALL pertinent commercial and other relationships;
 - The Editors and Advisory Board members of J. mt. area res. should declare their affiliation with the journal in the Conflict of Interest statement.
 - The Conflict of Interest statement should be included within the main text file.

 FUNDING

 - Authors must disclose all sources of funding for their research and its publication, or for their publication if it is not a research publication.
 - Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. If in doubt, please check the Open Funder Registry for the correct           nomenclature: https://www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/.

Review policy

J. mt. area res. adopts a rigorous peer-review procedure. All submissions are initially evaluated carefully by the editors. Manuscripts that are not deemed by the editors to be strong candidates for publication will be returned to the authors before peer-review. The manuscripts passing the initial review will be sent to at least two qualified peer reviewers. The journal adopts both single and double blind peer review system, authors are given option at the submission stage. Being a multidisciplinary journal, the editorial criteria can be made uniform across disciplines. The editors will make every effort to reach decisions on these papers within shortest possible time. Accepted papers will normally be published online as early as possible. Any major changes are not allowed after acceptance.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

The work published in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

There are no Article Processing Charges (APCs) for all authors worldwide. All costs of the manuscript processing and publishing are borne by the Karakoram International University.

Publishing Schedule

This journal is published annually. However, accepted papers are normally published online as early as possible with full citation details.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Journal Archiving

 This journal utilizes the CLOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...