Publishing Policies

Digital Publishing Charter

Rupkatha Books

Introduction

Rupkatha Books is the scholarly book publishing wing of Aesthetix Media Services (OPC) Private Limited, incorporated in India by the Government of India, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, under the Companies Act, 2013 (18 of 2013) and Rule 18 of the Companies (Incorporation) Rules, 2014. It is an independent academic publishing organisation dedicated to advancing global knowledge through open, ethical, and technology-enabled scholarly communication. Alongside its book publishing programme, Aesthetix Media Services publishes and supports a portfolio of peer-reviewed scholarly journals and digital academic initiatives.

Founded as a born-digital publisher, Rupkatha Books embraces a publishing model designed for the future of scholarship. Through its commitment to Universal Open Access, Rupkatha Books removes economic, geographical, technological, and institutional barriers to scholarly communication in order to ensure that high-quality research remains freely accessible to readers, educators, researchers, and policymakers worldwide.

The publishing programme is founded on the principles of academic freedom, editorial independence, research integrity, openness, inclusivity, accessibility, sustainability, and technological innovation. It publishes original monographs, edited volumes, translations, critical editions, reference works, conference proceedings, open educational resources, multimedia scholarship, and other research-based publications across the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary fields. Every publication is conceived as a permanent digital scholarly resource that is openly accessible, globally discoverable, interoperable across international research infrastructures, and preserved for future generations.

Rupkatha Books actively adopts and develops emerging technologies and global best practices, including persistent identifiers, interoperable metadata, semantic publishing, machine-readable scholarship, responsible applications of artificial intelligence, digital accessibility, and trusted long-term preservation systems to maximise the visibility, usability, integrity, and impact of scholarly publications.

These Publishing Policies establish the ethical, editorial, legal, operational, and technological framework governing all publications issued under the Rupkatha Books imprint. They apply to authors, editors, reviewers, translators, contributors, institutional partners, and readers, and collectively define the standards that guide every stage of the publishing lifecycle.

The policies are informed by internationally recognised principles and best practices, including those developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), UNESCO, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Crossref, ORCID, Creative Commons, the DOI Foundation, and other organisations supporting responsible scholarly publishing. They are designed as living policies that will evolve continuously in response to advances in research, publishing technologies, international standards, and the changing needs of the global scholarly community.

These policies shall be reviewed periodically to reflect developments in Open Access publishing, digital scholarship, research infrastructure, and international best practices.

The latest version of these Publishing Policies published on the official Rupkatha Books website shall constitute the authoritative edition.

Digital Publishing Charter

Rupkatha Books

Policies:

Our Open Access Publications