Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms & Scope of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") constitute a legally binding agreement between you ("User", "Author", "Reviewer", or "Visitor") and Dhvani Publication / Poorvam ("we", "us", or "our"), governing access to and use of poorvam.com, associated subdomains, application interfaces, and our open-access scholarly publishing operations.

By navigating our website, registering an account, submitting manuscripts to the Poorvam International Journal of Computer Science, Applications and Communication Engineering (PIJCACE, ISSN: 3107-6866), conducting peer reviews, or enrolling in PyMinds educational seminars, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by these Terms and our companion Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and Publication Ethics Policy.

2. Author Warranties & Submission Terms

Authors submitting papers, technical notes, or conference proceedings to PIJCACE warrant and certify the following upon manuscript transmission:

• Originality: The manuscript represents the authors' genuine original work, has not been published elsewhere in whole or substantial part, and is not currently under consideration by another journal or conference.
• Non-Plagiarism: The work contains no plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified content. All cited literature and external intellectual debts are meticulously referenced in accordance with standard scholarly conventions. All submissions are screened using automated similarity detection software.
• Ethical Clearances & Consents: Where research involves human subjects, patient data, clinical interventions, or animals, the authors affirm that appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee approvals were obtained and informed consent documentation secured.
• Authorship Legitimacy: All named authors made substantial scientific contributions and have reviewed and approved the final submission. Honorary or "ghost" authorship is strictly prohibited.
• Conflict of Interest: Authors must fully disclose all financial or personal affiliations that could bias or be perceived as biasing the research conclusions.

3. Intellectual Property & Open Access Licensing

Poorvam champions Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) principles to ensure global dissemination of technological scholarship without paywalls:

• Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: Published articles in PIJCACE are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Anyone is free to read, download, print, copy, and share the articles in any medium, provided full citation attribution is given to the authors and PIJCACE, no commercial exploitation occurs, and no derivative modifications or adaptations are distributed.
• Author Copyright Retention: Authors retain copyright in their individual works without restriction. Authors grant Poorvam and Dhvani Publication an exclusive first-publication license and an irrevocable non-exclusive worldwide license to publish, display, preserve, index, and syndicate the Work.
• Platform Intellectual Property: All software source code, branding, logos, layout designs, and interface components comprising the Poorvam website are the proprietary property of Dhvani Publication and protected under international copyright and trademark legislation.

4. Peer Review Process & Editorial Discretion

All scholarly submissions undergo rigorous double-blind peer review overseen by the PIJCACE Editorial Board:

• Editorial Independence: Editorial decisions (Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, Reject) are based strictly on scientific merit, originality, methodology, and relevance. Editorial decisions are independent from publication fees or sponsorship.
• Reviewer Confidentiality: Invited reviewers agree to treat all unpublished manuscripts and data as strictly confidential and not to appropriate ideas, circulate copies, or utilize unpublished material for personal research.
• Appeals: Authors may submit one reasoned appeal to the Editor-in-Chief in the event of suspected factual misunderstanding or procedural irregularities during review. Editorial determinations on appeals are final.

5. Publication Fees, Waivers & Refund Policy

To sustain open-access hosting, Crossref DOI registration, similarity indexing, and long-term digital preservation, PIJCACE assesses transparent Article Processing Charges (APCs):

• No Submission Fees: There are no submission fees charged for initial manuscript transmission or peer review assessment. APCs apply only following formal peer-review acceptance.
• Economic Hardship Waivers: In alignment with Research4Life principles, full or partial APC waivers are extended to corresponding authors from low-income and lower-middle-income economies, as well as unfunded student scholars upon written application prior to final acceptance.
• Refund Guidelines: Once an accepted article has completed copyediting, XML tagging, DOI assignment, and final public release, APC payments are strictly non-refundable due to the irreversible incurring of infrastructure and third-party registry costs. For comprehensive particulars regarding pre-publication cancellations and seminar ticket adjustments, refer to our detailed Refund & Waiver Policy.

6. Digital Archival & Scientific Record Permanency

In accordance with international standards for scholarly communication and DOI allocation under the International DOI Foundation (IDF):

Published articles are permanently preserved in independent digital repositories (including Zenodo, PKP Preservation Network, and LOCKSS/CLOCKSS nodes). Articles assigned an official Crossref DOI (prefix 10.63752/pijcace) become an irrevocable part of the permanent scientific record.

Articles cannot be removed or altered without formal Corrigendum, Erratum, or Retraction notices published in accordance with COPE Retraction Guidelines.

7. User Conduct & Platform Security

Users agree to use Poorvam platform solely for lawful academic, research, and educational purposes. You expressly agree not to:

• Deploy automated scrapers, crawlers, or extraction bots that degrade service availability or circumvent platform rate limits without written permission.
• Attempt to breach authentication security, gain unauthorized access to peer-review files, or impersonate other researchers, authors, or editorial board members.
• Share account credentials or delegate peer-review portal access to unauthorized third parties without notifying the managing editor.
• Post defamatory, abusive, harassing, or illicit material in public commentary sections or interactive seminar forums.

8. Disclaimers & Limitation of Liability

Scientific Opinions: The perspectives, methodologies, empirical datasets, and conclusions published in PIJCACE or discussed during PyMinds webinars are solely those of the respective individual authors or contributors. They do not represent official positions or endorsements of Dhvani Publication, Poorvam, its editors, or sponsor institutions.

Warranty Disclaimer: The platform, digital archives, and all downloaded articles are delivered on an "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" basis without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including fitness for a particular computational or engineering implementation.

Limitation of Damages: To the fullest extent permissible by applicable law, Dhvani Publication and Poorvam officers shall not be held liable for any indirect, consequential, punitive, or incidental damages arising from platform downtime, lost research data, or reliance on published content.

9. Governing Law & Dispute Jurisdiction

These Terms and any non-contractual disputes arising from or relating to our scholarly publishing services shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the substantive laws of India, without regard to principles of conflicts of law.

Any legal proceeding or equitable action arising under these Terms shall be subject to the exclusive personal and subject-matter jurisdiction of the competent courts in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India. Parties agree to attempt good-faith informal conciliation for 30 calendar days prior to initiating formal litigation.

10. Contact & Legal Notices

For legal notices, permissions queries, copyright infringement notices (DMCA / Indian Copyright Act), or clarification regarding these Terms: