Ethics and good editorial practices

CienciaUAT is committed towards ensuring an editorial process adhered to the highest ethical standards, promoting that authors, editors, evaluators, and staff participate in an environment of responsibility and honesty which privileges the relevance and scientific quality of the published materials, as well as inclusion and diversity.

Editors and evaluators must ensure that the double-blind process (where authors and evaluators do not know each other) is successfully carried out. They must also respect the assigned revision times or excuse themselves from the process if they are unable to comply with them in order to assign researchers with time availability and no conflicts of interest. They must also avoid sharing privileged information of the evaluated papers.

Members of CienciaUAT editorial committee agree with the policies and principles established by COPE (Committee for Publication Ethics). The committee’s suggestions and recommendations will be followed in the pursuit of good editorial practices when ethical issues are raised in received or published manuscripts.

Authors

CienciaUAT does not tolerate plagiarism. Authors must make a written declaration stating that the manuscript submitted to CienciaUAT is original and unpublished and is the result of theorical or empirical research carried out by the authors, rigorously following an appropriate scientific methodology which is an outcome of their direct intellectual engagement and has not been previously published or submitted to a total or partial publication in any other means, in Spanish or any other language. Authors must also ensure that they will not submit the manuscript to any other publication while it is undergoing an evaluation process in CienciaUAT. Manuscripts must not be submitted elsewhere after they have been accepted for publication.

About the studies to be published

The identity and personal information of the participants in the study must be protected, and authors must obtain an informed consent of individuals before making public any confidential information.

In healthcare studies, an express mention must be made regarding the approval of the research’s protocol by an ethics committee. In the case of any involvement of human subjects, researchers must inform about the procedures followed to obtain a written informed consent from all participants. All procedures carried out with human subjects must adhere to the ethical guidelines regarding human subjects published in the 1975 Helsinki Declaration.

When experimentation or privately owned animals are used, a statement must be made regarding the undertaken measures to minimize pain and discomfort. In the case of experimentation animals, a declaration identifying the ethics committee that approved the research methodology must be included. In the case of privately owned animals or clients in clinical trials, the owner’s written informed consent must have been obtained, and an explicit declaration of this must be made in the manuscript.

Experiments and clinical trials must adhere to the guidelines established by the National Institutes of Health in the United States of America regarding the care and use of animals for experimentation procedures, or the 24 November 1986 guidelines of the Council of the European Union. They must also adhere to the national and local laws and regulations.

The editors reserve the right to reject manuscripts that do not offer a clear description of the procedures followed to obtain an ethical approval or the application of appropriate procedures.