Volume 1, Issue 1

There are a great many journals. The honest question for anyone starting a new one is what this journal will do that the existing ones do not.

The answer is not novelty of subject. Law, nursing, literature, history, education, policy and environmental science are all well served by excellent journals, and this journal does not pretend to compete with them at the top of their fields. The answer is a matter of access, and of how a manuscript is treated when it arrives.

Consider the ordinary situation of a college teacher in a district town who has spent two years studying something worth knowing: how cases move through the courts, how nursing students cope with the demands of training, what a forgotten Hindi periodical reveals about its readership. That research is often good. What happens to it is often one of three things. It goes to a journal that publishes anything for a fee, where nobody reads it and nobody cites it. It goes to a journal that never replies. Or it is not written up at all, because the author reasonably concludes that neither outcome is worth two years of work.

This journal exists for that manuscript. Three commitments follow from it, and they are commitments rather than aspirations because a reader can check each one.

The first is that we reply. Every submission receives a written editorial response within seven working days, and every manuscript that goes to review receives the reviewers’ reports, whether the decision is acceptance or rejection.

The second is that we charge nothing. No submission fee, no processing charge, no publication charge, no fee for a certificate, no paid fast track. A publication charge decides who can publish before anyone has read a word.

The third is that the standard does not move. Review is double anonymous, against criteria published on this website. Those criteria apply equally to a manuscript from a national institute and a manuscript from a college nobody has heard of.

In this issue

This founding issue brings together five articles from law, political thought and the health sciences. The first offers a five-year empirical analysis of case pendency in the High Courts of India and argues for measures that would make adjudication faster without making it less fair. The second examines M. N. Roy’s theory of organised democracy and asks whether periodic elections are enough to secure popular sovereignty in India. Two studies from nursing education follow: one measures the level of stress among B.Sc. Nursing students in Guwahati, Assam, and the other assesses their knowledge, skills and practice regarding patient safety. The issue closes with a review of neuropsychiatric disorders, their causes, diagnosis and management.

We are not indexed yet, and we say so plainly on the indexing and preservation page rather than implying accreditation we do not hold. We do not have an impact factor, and we will not display a purchased one. We are new, and the only honest response to that is to do the work well from the first issue and let the record accumulate.

Manuscripts are now invited for Volume 1, Issue 2 (October to December 2026). The submission guidelines set out precisely what to send and what happens after you send it.