The Revista de Comunicación y Salud through this code of ethics shows a declaration of good intentions that commits both authors and reviewers, as well as, internally, its editorial team and the members of its Scientific and Good Conduct Committees. Therefore, this code must be endorsed by all those who intervene in the publication of scientific papers in this journal.
The authors:
As it is a publication governed by the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial 4.0 International, the author assigns the copyright and publication rights to the journal through said free access public intellectual property system, by signing the text of the letter of originality and transfer of rights found on its website. They undertake not to falsify authorship, not accepting people who have not actively participated in the generation of the presented article. They declare to be governed by applying truthfulness and rigor in titles and abstracts, avoiding 'favorable' citations, and declaring the exact origin of the work content (doctoral thesis, research project, teaching experience...) They are obliged not to commit plagiarism, defined as the appropriation of texts from other authors without their consent and without citing their source, even if the permission had been expressed by these third-party authors. Likewise, they undertake not to include in the postulated texts other texts already created by themselves, avoiding that there is more than 20% coincidence between a previous text and the postulated one. There are computer programs that, with a low error rate, weight the percentage of coincidences of the compared texts and that are applied to the papers submitted in this journal. The editors use: www.crossref.org/crosscheck/index.html www.grammarly.com, www.copyscape.com/online-plagiarism/ www.plagium.com, www.plagiarisma.net; and whenever a coincidence level greater than 25% is detected in any of them, the text will be passed through two others. If the coincidence level persists, the Ethics Committee of the journal will act to clarify the case. The proposed article must be original and must not be simultaneously submitted to another publication or have been published previously in any medium. Reformulations of drawn lines of research and updates of past published works are accepted to complete the research. Likewise, suitably updated and adequate unpublished works or works that are only accessible in minute books can be presented from presentations to Scientific Congresses specifying the origin before the evaluating Editorial Board of our journal. The author or authors are exclusively responsible for the statements made in their article to avoid any type of conflict of interest between the Revista de Comunicación y Salud and third parties or institutions. Regarding the materials used in the article, the authors undertake to request the necessary permissions for the reproduction of texts, illustrations, videos, audios, and other documentary sources whose publication requires prior authorization in order not to violate legally recognized copyright. The author/s are legally responsible for not violating the copyright derived from the misuse of their sources. If it is an article derived from a very broad investigation, and given the limitation of a research article, successive submissions can be proposed as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd part. Following the recommendations of the APEI Report on publication in scientific journals (Baiget and Torres-Salinas, 2013) where the work of Bebeau and Davis (1996) is cited, it is objectionable that the authors: - Cite sources without having been consulted. - Employ erroneous interpretations of other previous works consulted. - Omit data that contradicts or disagrees with the conclusions of the article. - Release scientific results prematurely, before peer review. - Keep research findings secret. - Hide data and methods that allow the reexamination of the used experiments or rework interpretative theories. - Do not keep the primary data from the field research for reference. - Accredit false or non-verified authorship. Everything referred to above is required by the journal’s editor and stands as a binding commitment for the authors, so that applying a work for publication implies accepting these terms. Its deliberate non-compliance is equivalent to waiving the evaluation of the article and entails not being able to republish in the journal within 4 calendar years from the presentation.
The editors:
On the part of the publishing entity, the ethical commitment resides in: - Not publishing works not approved by peer review designated for this purpose to maintain a quality criterion required in journals of high scientific prestige. Thus, the author will always know that publishing supposes clear support for his research career. - Avoid promoting self-citations (citations of articles in the journal itself) or manipulating directly or indirectly (by pressuring the authors) to cite works of interest to the journal to improve its positioning in reference impact indexes. - To maintain free access to the published works on the Internet, as well as to inform the author of the status of the evaluation from the moment the proposal is received until its final rejection or acceptance, whether with or without modifications.
The reviewers:
As it is an evaluation system based on the work of arbitration of the article by blind peers, in case of disagreement between these two initial reviewers, they undertake not to try to find out who is the author of the evaluated article, so this knowledge does not positively or negatively influence their decision. If authorship is accidentally discovered, either due to the subject dealt with or due to the author's writing, the reviewer must renounce the evaluation exclusively if there are prejudices about this author. Knowing who is applying does not imply that the arbitrator knows the author personally or has a certain positive or negative predisposition towards him. In other words, conflict of interest will be avoided. Likewise, the reviews will be carried out within a maximum period of one month after the paper has been submitted. If there is an absolute discrepancy between the two reviewers, a third tie-breaking opinion will be requested and if the option of 'publishable with improvements' occurs, the new term for the reevaluation of said improvements will be 15 days from the author's submission.
Good Conduct Committee of the journal:
Formed by 5 members of its Scientific Committee and renewed every 4 calendar years (since 2010), it will ensure to bring positions between authors and reviewers closer if discrepancies arise, in its capacity as commissioner of the Editor. Authors can contact them by e-mail at their address: comunicacionysalud@hisin.org. They will be answered within a maximum period of 30 days from the receipt of the email. When any irregularity is detected or there are doubts about a proposal, it will act ex officio after its discovery, to clarify the situation, applying an ethical code that corresponds to the following flow chart taken as an international reference, among other existing ones, and created by the British organization COPE (Committee On Publication Ethics), available on its website: www.publicationethics.org and directly accessible from: http://publicationethics.org/files/All_Flowcharts_Spanish.pdf Their decisions will be final.
