About the Journal

Nepal Public Policy Review (NPPR) (ISSN Print: 2795-1901 and Online 2795-191X) is a peer-reviewed journal published by Policy Research Institute (PRI), a policy think-tank of the Government of Nepal. PRI believes that the participation of the public in the policy formulation process enhances public ownership of the resultant policy and makes it effective. As such, it advocates and adopts a democratic process in policy formulation. 

Unlike most of the mainstream journals that deal with specific issues, NPPR stands out as a unique channel that accepts research papers from a wide variety of themes and issues related to public policy. 

These themes and issues include (a) development, infrastructure and economic affairs; (b) federal affairs, (c) legal issues, (d) governance and public service delivery; (e) political and social affairs; (f) national interests, foreign policy and strategic affairs; and (g) science, technology, and environment.

PRI publishes this journal to disseminate works that are relevant to the scope of PRI and meets the expectations and standards of the academic and policy community. It is a double-blind, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. NPPR journal is promoted by PRI, an institution run by public money. All the managerial and production expenses are managed by PRI. Therefore will be no article processing and publication fee for accepted articles. The audiences of NPPR are policymakers, practitioners, researchers, academicians and those interested in public policy issues.

NPPR will be driven and maintained by a board of NPPR. PRI will host it with necessary backstopping support.

Aims and Scope

NPPR is an interdisciplinary journal. Its aim is to serve as a scholarly platform for the interface between knowledge and policy. To this end, it promotes academic research to trigger evidence-based policymaking in Nepal.

NPPR publishes high-quality articles covering a broad spectrum of public policy issues in relation to, among others, health, education, technology, foreign relations, industrial relations and relevant social sciences issues. It brings together research and policy practice insights that inform, develop and affect public policy both at micro and macro levels. It publishes both theoretical as well as empirical papers sufficiently backed by evidence.

NPPR welcomes research papers from across the globe on issues related to Nepal, particularly the issues that fall under the aims and scope of the journal. NPPR also welcomes study manuscripts that broadly analyze global agenda that focus on and relate to developing countries. Such articles are expected to specifically establish the implication of the global agenda on Nepal.

NPPR will have two parts. The first part contains research articles and the second part provides space for commentaries on issues of public policy concerns

Review Process

NPPR employs a double-blind peer-review process to ensure objective, unbiased and rigorous reviews of articles in order to maintain the scholarly quality of published research articles. Peer reviewers, the heart and strength of the journal, remain anonymous throughout the process and will review articles, based on their expertise, for the first part – the research section – of the journal. Reviewers are selected from PRI’s scholarly database matched by their expertise.

The peer-review process is outlined below. 

All the manuscripts submitted for the research part will be evaluated by the editors in consultation with subject experts of Policy Research Institute without disclosing the author’s identity. The manuscripts will be evaluated based on the scope of the journal, originality of the content and minimum acceptable academic quality and readability. 

The submitted manuscript that meets the initial evaluation criteria will be forwarded to at least two reviewers. We give 20 days for reviewers to review the manuscript. The Executive Editor or associate editor will evaluate the review comments and send editorial decisions to the author(s). The author(s) will get at least 15 days to revise the manuscript. 

Reviewers are asked to evaluate and submit reports based on the criteria of: originality; methodological soundness; good research design; compliance with appropriate ethical guidelines; results being presented clearly, based on facts and in support of the conclusion presented; and appropriate referencing and citation. 

Editors will review the reports by reviewers and decide whether a further revision is necessary. The editorial decision (of rejection, further revision or acceptance), along with reviewer recommendations, will be passed on to the authors.

The final decision on the article is taken by the Editorial Team based on the report from the assigned editor. The decision of the Editorial Team is final.

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 aim of NPPR is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly articles thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. Hence, NPPR grants permission to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles which are available online freely.

Article Processing Fee

This journal is promoted by the Policy Research Institute, a think tank for the Government of Nepal. PRI supports all required logistics for this journal, therefore, NPPR does not require raising revenue to operate the journal. So, you do not need to pay for submission and editorial processes - which means there is NO ARTICLE PROCESSING FEE.

Copyright Policy

NPPR allows to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose. The content copyright is retained by the author and the work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Repository Policy

Journal is indexed in Nepal Journal Online and, therefore, reposits all accepted articles following their repository compliances. You can find NPPR's published content in NepJol ( https://www.nepjol.info/index.php/nppr).  

[update: May 06, 2023] NPPR uses the PKP Preservation Network for archiving.

Plagiarism

NPPR adopts zero tolerance for plagiarism. All submitted manuscripts are checked for plagiarism using a similarity checking application during editorial screening. All those passes editorial screening will go through the review process. In addition, we also check similarity every time when an author submits a revised version. In addition, we are aware that translated contents are not traced by the similarity checking application. Therefore, we have retraction policy if the article is found to be translated from another language .

 Dispute Resolution Mechanism

NPPR follows the widely accepted dispute resolution process outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and is in practice among publishers and editors across the world. NPPR has the following policy on the most frequent issues that every academic journal and editor encounters.

Correction and Retraction Policy: Ensuring compliance with all requirements in submitted articles is the responsibility of the editorial team. As such, the editorial team makes the final decision on the magnitude of correction to be made to the original article.

Declaration of Interest: 

• Author(s) must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could possibly influence the work. Author(s) should include a declaration on the conflict of interest while submitting their manuscripts.
•  Reviewers are also required to disclose the potential conflicts of interest regarding the manuscript they have reviewed.

Author Contribution Statement (Updated date: March 29, 2023)

NPPR adopts CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) information to enhance scholarly contribution transparency with the intention of recognizing individual authors. NPPR only recognizes the contributing authors if the following criteria are met. Any other contributors not meeting the authorship criteria should be acknowledged separately in the Acknowledgement section. 

If you wish to learn more about authorship criteria, please visit the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Elsevier Author Credit statement policy, Wiley Author Credit Statement Policy or any other well-recognized academic publishing platform.

1. Conceiving ideas; formulation of overarching research goals and aims
2. Development or design of research methodology
3. Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal tools for the study
4. Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
5. Provision of study materials, instrumentation, computing resources
6. Report initial draft/review/ final draft polishing

The sample Author contribution statement should be as follows

Author1 (Name here): Conceiving ideas; formulation of overarching research goals and aims; Development or design of methodology; Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal tools for the study; Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments or data/evidence collection; Report initial draft/review/ final draft polishing;

Author 2 (Name here): Conceiving ideas; formulation of overarching research goals and aims; Development or design of methodology; Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal tools for the study; Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments or data/evidence collection; Provision of study materials, instrumentation, and computing resources; Report initial draft/review/ final draft polishing;

Author 3 (Name here): Conceiving ideas; formulation of overarching research goals and aims; Development or design of methodology; Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments or data/evidence collection; Provision of study materials, instrumentation, computing resources; Report initial draft/review/ final draft polishing;

There is no specific policy regarding the number of authors in a single article, however, NPPR strongly discourage crediting authors who do not have a significant scholarly contribution.

In addition, NPPR is against gift authorship, in any form. Once we found with proof - we will immediately take action against the authorship issue - which may even lead to the retraction of the article and issue a public notice.