Scholarly infrastructure
A factual application roadmap for IJCI identifiers, metadata exchange, discovery infrastructure, preservation, and external indexing. Technical readiness is not the same as eligibility or acceptance.
External actions & eligibility gates
This list deliberately avoids claiming that a threshold has been met unless the fact is verified in IJCI records. External criteria may change; IJCI should re-check the linked official requirements immediately before each application.
Persistent identifiers and public publisher facts must be verified before they are displayed or used in applications.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) is the active license for published scholarly articles unless an individual Version of Record explicitly states otherwise. Creative Commons does not require a separate registration or approval to use the standard license; the journal must apply it accurately and hold the rights necessary to license the material.
A confirmed ISSN/eISSN is required before DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, MEDLINE, and PMC applications. IJCI does not display an ISSN until formal assignment is verified.
Crossref-ready metadata infrastructure is implemented using schema 5.5.0. Crossref membership and a DOI prefix are not yet active and no DOI is displayed unless registered.
A verified full publisher/editorial-office address still needs to be supplied. DOAJ requires a publisher address, and Web of Science requires a verifiable physical business-office address (not a P.O. Box). No address is invented or inferred by IJCI.
These public technical surfaces support scholarly discovery and metadata exchange. They do not constitute third-party indexing by themselves.
The site is technically ready for Search Console verification. Add the Google-issued verification token as VITE_GOOGLE_SITE_VERIFICATION, then verify the property and submit /sitemap.xml in Search Console. A Domain property uses DNS verification instead.
Dynamic sitemap exposes public journal pages, articles, authors, institutions, specialties, topics, and notices.
A machine-readable OAI-PMH harvesting endpoint is available for the published record.
Published records support JATS XML metadata export. PMC participation would additionally require NLM technical validation of complete full-text XML and article asset packages.
Journal and article metadata are exposed through machine-readable JSON and scholarly API surfaces.
Article pages expose citation_* metadata, canonical article URLs, PDF URLs, author metadata, references, and Schema.org ScholarlyArticle markup. Inclusion timing remains controlled by Google.
ORCID identifiers are normalized and exposed only when supplied by authors; missing ORCIDs are never invented.
IJCI is establishing independent long-term preservation with a recognized third-party preservation service. Until such participation is formally active, IJCI does not claim preservation through LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, PubMed Central, or another external archive.
Each provider applies its own rules. The statuses below describe current public requirements and IJCI's factual readiness, not likelihood of acceptance.
Current gates include a confirmed ISSN and an actively publishing scholarly open-access journal. A new journal must demonstrate more than one year of publishing history OR at least 10 open-access research articles, and must publish at least five research articles per year. The website must clearly show OA/license/copyright terms, all author fees, publisher name/address/contact, editorial-board affiliations, peer review, and publication ethics. Each scholarly article requires at least two independent reviewers. For continuous publication, editor/board/reviewer endogeny must remain at or below 25% of research papers in the last calendar year (minimum five papers). Special-issue safeguards also apply.
Technical gates include a registered ISSN, peer-reviewed content with a public peer-review description, publication on a regular basis, a publication history that can be reviewed, English-language titles and abstracts, and a public publication-ethics/malpractice statement. Editorial quality, content, standing, regularity, and online availability are then evaluated externally.
Initial triage requires a registered ISSN displayed consistently, a clearly defined publisher, a verifiable physical publisher business-office address, a journal URL/content access, a public peer-review policy, and contact details. Editorial triage then evaluates English titles/abstracts, ethics, board affiliations and countries, author affiliations, accurate website information, and adherence to the stated publication schedule. Sufficient content and editorial rigor are required for full quality evaluation. No acceptance is implied by meeting triage requirements.
NLM pre-application requirements include a properly registered ISSN, electronic publication/access, at least 40 primary peer-reviewed articles in final form, at least 12 months of publication history, applicable language requirements, and abstracts for peer-reviewed content. IJCI must wait until all thresholds are met before applying.
PMC pre-application requirements include a registered ISSN, immediate NLM access to journal content, at least 25 peer-reviewed articles in final form, and applicable language requirements. NLM also expects publishers generally to have a two-year history of quality life-sciences publishing, while allowing consideration of newer publishers when responsible personnel demonstrate adequate comparable experience. Applications then undergo scope screening, scientific-quality review, and technical evaluation. Selected journals must provide complete full-text XML conforming to an acceptable DTD (NLM recommends JATS), PDFs when available, high-resolution figures, and supplementary files.
Crossref is DOI and metadata infrastructure, not a journal quality index. Once membership and a prefix are active, IJCI must register accurate metadata for applicable journal articles going forward, maintain a unique active landing page for each DOI, display registered DOI links near bibliographic information, and maintain/update resource URLs and metadata over time. Reference, license, funding, ORCID, and affiliation metadata should be deposited when available.
Google Scholar discovery is automated rather than a journal-quality approval process. IJCI provides unique crawlable article pages, complete visible abstracts, full-text PDF links, citation metadata, canonical URLs, author information, and references. PDFs should retain searchable text with the title prominently at the top, authors immediately below it, and a clearly labeled References/Bibliography section.
Readiness page last reviewed: September 19, 2026.