Ethical guidelines
The journal ensures good practices in academic publishing by following the guidelines established by the Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE). The ethical principles and other policies related to transparency, accountability, intellectual property, accessibility and reproduction rights, among others, are detailed below.
1. Authors’ responsibility
Authors of a manuscript are considered to be those persons who have made a significant contribution to the final product.
Authors should present results of rigorous, transparent and ethical research processes, assuming responsibility for the published research. Their research methods should be described, in such a way that the scientific community can corroborate or replicate the study.
When submitting their papers, authors must complete, sign and attach this Authorship Responsibility Statement in which, among other information, they declare that their work is original and unpublished. Authors should refrain from submitting the manuscript simultaneously to two or more journals.
Authors should carefully select the order of appearance of their names in the submitted paper. The first author will be considered the senior author and, unless otherwise specified, will oversee correspondence with the journal. After the article has been submitted, changes can only be made to the list of authors, both in the order and in adding or deleting people, by sending an e-mail to the Editorial Board and explaining the reasons for the changes.
For reasons of transparency, each author of a manuscript must declare his or her specific contribution, for which the CRediT taxonomy of roles is followed.
Any controversy related to the authorship of a manuscript should be communicated by e-mail to the journal, and will be resolved by the Editorial Board and communicated to the parties involved in the shortest possible time.
1.1. Plagiarism detection
Authors are committed to submit original and unpublished articles. This implies the absence of plagiarism (appropriation of ideas or phrases from third parties) or self-plagiarism (duplicate publication without attribution or excessive self-citation).
Authors should indicate, by means of a note on the first page of the article submitted, whether it was prepared from materials available in previous publications, repositories or on the web. The contents reused in the manuscripts must be duly referenced in accordance with the APA 7 citation guidelines. The degree of self-citation allowed will be at the discretion of the editor in charge, according to each case and in accordance with the guidelines mentioned above.
As part of the initial process of receiving articles and the formal review of submissions, the journal performs a plagiarism check of the manuscript using Crossref and Turnitin software.
If plagiarism or self-plagiarism is detected in an article, the editorial team has the authority to reject the submission directly or to contact the authors to request the corresponding explanations and the necessary adjustments.
When the submitted articles require modifications by the authors —as part of the result of peer review— the new version of the paper will be subjected to the analysis of anti-plagiarism software.
Beyond the technical analysis performed by the journal, all participants in the editorial process (editors, reviewers, as well as readers of an article once it has been published) can alert the responsible editor or the journal to a possible detection of plagiarism by sending an e-mail. Actions to be taken when plagiarism is reported are addressed in the subsection “Corrections, complaints and malpractice claims management”.
1.2. Data availability
Following the SciELO Guidelines for Transparency and Openness Promotion in Journal Policies and Practices (Transparency and Openness Promotion) on data transparency, authors of articles resulting from original research should report whether the dataset used in their study is available and, if so, where to access it. Some possible repositories for open data are: SciELO Data, Mendeley Data, Zenodo, DANS, DataHub, FigShare.
In case the authors have their data in any server, they should state it alongside the submission as follows: “The dataset supporting the results of this study is available at [name and link to repository]”.
If not, they should include the following statement: “The dataset supporting the results of this study is not available”.
In all cases, authors should make the research data available to the referees, if required.
1.3. Research involving human subjects and animal experimentation
For all research involving human subjects and animal experimentation, the submission of an Ethics Committee approval will be considered. This approval should provide specific details regarding the institution and the committee that granted it, including the corresponding number and date. The Method section should include a subsection on ethical considerations, detailing the main aspects related to procedures and informed consents pertinent to the study, as well as mentioning the approval (identification number and/or issuing institution) if available.
In research involving potentially vulnerable persons or groups (whether due to age, disability, gender, racial and ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic level, institutionalization, among others, as well as their possible intersections), the procedures and specific care taken to ensure compliance with the ethical guidelines that apply to research with these populations will be detailed.
2. Reviewers' responsibility
Articles published in the journal are submitted to external peer review, using the double-blind refereeing system. Details of the evaluation process can be found in the Review process subsection.
Reviewers undertake to referee articles on a voluntary and honorary basis, in order to contribute to improve the quality of the papers through an objective and constructive review. They must be free of conflicts of interest in relation to the study submitted for evaluation.
They should follow the evaluation guidelines provided by the journal and comply with both the policies of the evaluation process and the deadlines stipulated for the task.
The manuscript under review is a confidential document, implying that reviewers may not quote or use the material or distribute copies of the work to others. If a reviewer intends to consult a third party about any aspect of the work, he/she must ask permission from the editor beforehand.
3. Responsibility of the editorial team
The responsible editor and the Editorial Board are committed to supervise the publication processes, following the highest ethical standards.
The editors will ensure that the articles are peer-reviewed by specialists in the subject, clearly informing about the rules of publication and respecting the confidentiality and anonymity of the arbitration process. Editors may not distribute copies of a manuscript under review to persons outside the review process, nor cite the material in their own publications until it has been accepted and published.
The editorial team will at all times follow the guidelines set out by COPE and described in the journal's editorial policies and best practices. Manuscripts submitted for review must meet the international ethical standards set forth by the American Psychological Association and the Declaration of Helsinki.
4. Conflicts of interest
All those involved in the editorial processing of a manuscript must make explicit and/or alert, at any stage of the process, about any personal, academic, political, financial or other interest that may influence or compromise in any way the evaluation and publication of the work.
When submitting their manuscripts, authors must make explicit any possible conflicts of interest, as well as inform if their work has received any type of funding or economic support from agencies, projects or individuals, and make explicit any possible link with parties interested in the research submitted for consideration by the journal.
The reviewers convened by the journal for the evaluation of manuscripts are responsible for alerting the Editorial Board of any conflict of interest or circumstance that may prevent them from carrying out the task in a suitable and objective manner.
In cases in which a member of the Editorial Board has a conflict of interest or is an interested party in the publication process of an article submitted to the journal, he/she will be replaced in his/her responsibilities by another member of the team, who will be in charge of managing the editorial process with independence and without compromising the principles of confidentiality and privacy of information.
5. Use of generative artificial intelligence
In accordance with the Heredia Declaration: Principles on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Publishing, the roles of authorship, peer review, and editing are performed exclusively by human beings, who bear sole responsibility for the actions and decisions made in the exercise of each of these roles.
Authors must explicitly disclose any use of AI in the research and writing processes. They are expected to specify the AI model, its version, and the date of use, as well as to detail how AI was applied, which products were integrated, and any other relevant information that ensures transparency in the development of scientific texts.
Reviewers must inform the editorial team if AI is employed as a complement to the review process. They should specify the model name, version, date of use, and the evaluation prompt. Reviewers must also be able to explain how they interacted with the AI, what inputs they received, and how these were used in their assessment of the scientific text. Authors and readers will be notified whenever review tasks have been supported through the use of AI.
Editors and the editorial team retain full responsibility for the editorial process. This responsibility must not be delegated to AI. Authors and readers will be notified whenever editorial tasks have been supported by the use of AI. In such cases, the model name, version, date of use, and the assigned prompt will be reported.
