Publishing

LMI Publishers is the scholarly publishing division of Link Medical Interface. We publish peer-reviewed, open-access journals in health, medicine, rehabilitation, and communication sciences, and we provide editorial and publishing services to institutions building journals of their own.

We operate from Lahore, and most of the research we publish comes from Pakistan and comparable settings. That shapes what we do. Good research is produced in places that lack the editorial infrastructure to publish it well, by researchers who are often navigating peer review for the first time and without a mentor to explain what a reviewer is actually asking for. Our purpose is to be the infrastructure that closes that gap — without lowering the standard that makes publication worth having.

What we publish

Five journals, four published by Link Medical Interface and one by BMU Ventures (Private) Limited. Each maintains its own website, editorial board, and full policy set. See the journals directory.

How we work

One framework, every journal. All titles operate under a single publishing policy framework covering peer review, publication ethics, open access, copyright, data sharing, generative AI, sex and gender reporting, retraction, and complaints. An author submitting to any of our journals meets the same standards and the same protections. See the framework.

Double-blind review, no exceptions. Every manuscript that clears editorial screening goes to a minimum of two independent reviewers who do not know who wrote it. Manuscripts from our own editors are routed through an independent editorial pathway from which those editors are entirely excluded.

The decision comes before the invoice. No fee is requested or accepted at submission. Nothing is charged for review. A publication fee becomes payable only after a manuscript has already been accepted on scholarly grounds. There is no priority handling, no fast track, and no amount of money that buys either.

Authors keep their copyright. We take a non-exclusive licence to publish. We do not ask authors to sign their work over to us, and we never will.

Published work stays published. Articles are preserved through the PKP Preservation Network, which keeps them retrievable independently of our servers.

What we do for authors

We give reasons. A desk rejection comes with an explanation of why, so the author can place the work elsewhere rather than guess. Reviewers are asked for criticism specific enough to act on, and told to distinguish what affects the validity of the study from what merely improves its presentation.

We publish our timelines and hold ourselves to them. Screening within three days, an editorial decision within roughly a week of receiving reviews, a full cycle typically completed inside eight to ten weeks. These are targets rather than guarantees, and when we expect to miss one we say so.

We waive fees when the fee is the obstacle. Partial or full waivers are available to authors facing financial hardship, to early-career researchers without funding, and to authors in resource-constrained settings. The request is made after acceptance — which means the decision to publish has already been taken, on the science, before money was ever discussed.

We publish confirmatory and null results. A well-conducted study that finds nothing is still a finding. Our editors evaluate such work on the same footing as anything else.

We appeal to a different editor. No one at our journals decides an appeal against their own decision.

Editorial and publishing services

We build and run the publishing infrastructure we use, and we make it available to universities, departments, professional bodies, and research groups that want a journal of their own but not the years of trial and error it usually takes to get one working.

Journal establishment — scope, title, editorial structure, ISSN application, launch planning. Platform setup — OJS installation, configuration, theming, maintenance. Policy development — a complete, coherent policy set built to withstand indexing scrutiny. Editorial workflow — submission, screening, reviewer management, decisions. Production — copyediting, typesetting, reference checking, proofing. Metadata and DOI — registration, structured metadata, quality control. Indexing readiness — an honest assessment of where a journal stands against the criteria that matter. Editor and reviewer training.

Discoverability, described honestly

Publishers routinely blur the difference between being findable, being listed, being indexed, and being recognised. These are four different things, granted by different bodies against different criteria, and collapsing them into a single boast — “internationally indexed” — is the oldest move in predatory publishing. We describe them separately.

Identifiers establish that an article exists and can be cited: ISSN for the journal, DOI for the article, ORCID for the author. Discovery means an article can be found: structured metadata deposited with Crossref, which is what allows scholarly search platforms, including Google Scholar, to surface it. Directories and indexes — DOAJ, abstracting services, citation databases — each apply their own inclusion criteria. Recognition — such as HEC’s — is granted and periodically reviewed by that authority alone.

We state a journal’s status with any given service only where the service has confirmed it. Where a journal does not hold something, we do not imply that it does.

Who runs it

LMI Publishers operates under Link Medical Interface, a company registered in Lahore (CUIN 0257154). Each journal has its own editorial board, listed in full on its own site. The publisher does not intervene in editorial decisions on acceptance, rejection, or retraction, and its role is limited to maintaining due process and consistency of policy. See governance and the ownership disclosure.

Submitting a manuscript? Compare the journals and their scopes in the directory. Building a journal? Write to publisher@lmi.education.