Terms of service
The rules for using our sites and buying our services, in plain words. Where you have signed our services agreement, the agreement comes first; these terms cover everything else.
Last updated: 1 October 2026 · Cancellation & refunds · How services are delivered · Privacy
1. Who we are
Smart Scholars is a partnership firm in Hyderabad, India, registered as a micro enterprise (Udyam UDYAM-TS-20-0215979) and under the Telangana Shops and Establishments Act (SEA/MED/JCL/RR/1402392/2026). Registered office: 304, MK Residency, Srinivasa Colony, Uppal, Hyderabad – 500039, Telangana, India · mou@smartscholars.in · +91-9885134413
These terms apply to smartscholars.in and to every Smart Scholars site: Journal Audit, GetIndexed, DOI Doctor, the DOI Registry and the doors for scholars, institutions, journals, partners and DOI members. "We" is Smart Scholars; "you" is whoever uses a site or buys a service.
2. The free tools
The free tools are free within the allowance each one shows. What they report comes from public registers — Crossref, OpenAlex, DOAJ, the ISSN Portal and others — and each finding links to its source so that you can check it. A finding is evidence, not a verdict: where a register is wrong or out of date, so is what we read from it.
Please do not try to get round an allowance (many connections, automated scripts), overload the sites, probe them for weaknesses, or use them to reach anyone who did not ask to hear from you. If you need more than an allowance gives, write to us: an account or a plan lifts most limits.
3. Accounts
One account works on every site. Give true details, keep your password to yourself, and tell us at once if you think someone else has used it: what is done with your account is yours to answer for. You can close your account at any time by writing to us. Deleting your data
4. What you post
What you write in the community or in a review stays yours. By posting it you let us show it on the page where you posted it and, for a review, on our home page, with the name you chose to show. A person reads every first post and every review before it appears, and removes what breaks the house rules: real names, real facts, links to the source; no sales pitches, no citation trading, nothing about a person that is not about their published work.
5. Paid services and payment
What a paid service includes, its price and its timing are stated on the order or the quote before you pay, and that statement governs. Prices are in Indian rupees unless the order says otherwise; a tax the law requires is shown before you pay. Work begins when payment is received, unless the order says otherwise.
You can pay by card, UPI or net-banking through Razorpay, or by a direct UPI or bank transfer with its reference number (UTR); a direct payment is confirmed by our team, usually within a few hours on working days. You can have an invoice for every payment.
A journal that engages us for indexing applications, DOI work or work in its own systems also signs our services agreement online, which sets out the work, the access we are given, personal data and confidentiality in full. How our services are priced
6. What we do not promise, and what we never do
- No index, database or directory has to accept a journal because we prepared its application. Those decisions belong to the organisations that run them, made on their own criteria.
- We do not write, ghost-write, translate or alter the scholarly content of any article, and we do not create citations, references, reviews or peer-review records that did not happen. No citations for sale, no impact factors claimed.
- Nothing is deposited at Crossref, sent to an index, written to a journal's website or posted on its accounts until the client has approved it.
7. Credentials you give us
A login or key you give us for a journal's systems is used only for the work you asked for, with the least access that will do it. It is stored encrypted, shown to nobody, shared with no one but the service it belongs to, and deleted when you ask or within thirty days of the last service ending. You can withdraw it at any time, and ask us for the record of what was changed with it.
8. Cancelling, refunds and ending
An order cancelled before the work begins is refunded in full. Either side may end a services agreement with fourteen days' written notice; work already paid for is then finished or refunded pro rata, at the client's choice. Every case, and how quickly a refund is made, is on the Cancellation & refunds page. Cancellation & refunds
9. Liability
The sites and the free tools are offered as they are. Neither side is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss. For paid work, our total liability for any claim is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before it arose. Nothing in these terms limits a liability that the law does not allow to be limited.
10. Whose work is whose
The sites, their software, their text and their design are ours. The public records they show belong to their sources and are shown under those sources' own terms. A report or file we deliver for an order is yours to use for your journal or your work.
11. Law, and changes to these terms
These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Hyderabad, Telangana have jurisdiction. If we change them, the date at the top changes; an order already paid for keeps the terms it was paid under.
Questions about these terms: write to us at mou@smartscholars.in.
