Code of Ethics of Sociedad y Ambiente
Core practices of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
1. Accusations of misconduct
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente requests a cover letter for each manuscript stating the following: that the proposal is original; that it has not been submitted to another journal simultaneously in any language; that all the authors agree with the content and with the order of publication authorship; and that there is no conflict of interest with the referees suggested in the author’s format. In case of any accusation from third parties, the complainant must send an explanatory message or text of his complaint by email to the journal’s address, including proof of his statement.
2. Authorship and contribution
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente requests, in the author data format, the specific contribution of each author in the conception of the proposal, the field and experimental work phase, data analysis, writing, and revision of the manuscript. If there are possible disputes, the complainant must send an explanatory message or text of their complaint by email to the journal’s address, including proof of their claim.
3. Complaints and appeals
The journal’s management receives the possible complaints and appeals that exist against the journal, its staff, the committee, and the editorial board and will decide the actions, such as communication to the denounced for rectification or, if it is a serious complaint, forward it for attention to the Ecosur Ethics Committee.
4. Conflicts of interest / competing interests
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente has an author data format where three possible referees’ suggestions are also requested. The referees must belong to institutions other than the author’s and with no conflict of interest. These reviewers will not necessarily be the ones who review the manuscript.
There is also a format where the associated editors, when they accept the coordination of of a manuscript peer review process, declare that they have no conflict of interest with the authors or the reviewers.
In the case of manuscripts by Ecosur authors, the review process is by associate editors external to the institution. The process of dealing with possible conflicts of interest is the same as those already described in practice 1.
5. Data and reproducibility
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente encourages authors to make data available to the public, on the journal’s platform, as supplementary material (attached files in Word or Excel, without style correction) for replicability, mainly in the case of quantitative works; or that use open access repositories to self-archive data, such as Zenodo-OpenAIRE: https://www.openaire.eu/faqs#article-id-1100
6. Ethical supervision
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente requests to make explicit in the articles submitted the informed consent for the use of interviews and workshop transcripts, among others. Likewise, it requests that the authors declare to ensure the anonymity of the informants for social works in the methods section or at the bottom of the page.
In the Acknowledgments, indicate the sources of financing for the research and the postgraduate scholarships some authors have received. Finally, we suggest including the following text: “we thank the anonymous reviewers for contributing to the improvement of the manuscript”.
7. Intellectual property
The Sociedad y Ambiente journal adheres to the Open Access movement, and there is no cost for article processing (APC) or its publication. We also have a Creative Commons license for international distribution (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
The journal applies the iThenticate program to each submitted manuscript to identify bibliographic similarities that could be considered plagiarism or self-plagiarism, which should not exceed 20 %. It is at the journal’s discretion to consider public data as bibliographic similarity or not.
The journal allows preprints if the manuscript if, when published, refers to our website in the repository used, for example: https://www.biorxiv.org and https://ecoevorxiv.org/discover
8. Journals management
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente has all the requirements for its management as an independent magazine (server, platform, equipment, software, and institutional budget, among others). Likewise, the work team has constant training, and we held an annual progress and feedback meeting with the Editorial Committee and the Editorial Board.
9. Peer Review Process
The review process carried out by the journal Sociedad y Ambiente is that of blind peers, with the anonymity of both authors and reviewers. The latter must be experts in the subject with no conflict of interest with the authors. We request three opinions per manuscript, and new revisions can be requested depending on the magnitude of the observations of the first round. In case of appeals and disputes, we handle following the criteria defined in practice 1.
10. Post-publication, discussions and corrections
The journal Sociedad y Ambiente has the Errata mechanism to point out corrections identified by the authors to the manuscript after its publication. The request for correction is the responsibility of the journal’s management, who will review the case and, where appropriate, make the pertinent clarification.
We also consider a Discussions section as a microsite in the OJS application. Likewise, Letters to the Journals Management are accepted, addressing topics already published in the magazine and through discussion.