Code of Ethics

VIVAT ACADEMIA is committed to fulfilling and maintaining ethical standards of behavior at all stages of the publication process. We adhere to industry associations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Elsevier's Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK), which establish standards and provide guidelines for best practices to meet these requirements.

Policy on authorship and contributions

At VIVAT ACADEMIA, we will respect the order of authorship and affiliation of the article, as it is assumed that the authors have agreed on this order and understand that they will be responsible as co-authors for the integrity of the information presented and the criteria expressed.

To prevent citation swapping and misattribution of authorship, the journal has decided to include an Author Contributions section in its article template, following the CRedit Taxonomy. Therefore, at the end of the bibliography, all contributions made by each author to both the research and the writing of the article must be presented, respecting the proposed structure. In the case of single-author articles, this section is not necessary, as all related points are assumed to belong to the same author.

The journal is committed to ensuring that all authors have reviewed and approved the final article before submission to the journal, for which the inclusion of the Rights Transfer Letter is required along with the other files when submitting a work.

Policy on complaints and appeals

Complaints from authors will be received as long as they are well-founded, and will be addressed as far as possible following the guidelines and diagrams recommended by COPE, as well as the internal norms of the journal. Under no circumstances will the complaint resolution process involve revealing the identity of reviewers.

The journal is committed to following clear and fair procedures to address any claims or appeals related to the publication of articles.

Any complaint about an evaluation process will be addressed as long as the author identifies possible errors in the review. The competence of the reviewer will not be questioned at any time. Complaints should be addressed to the editor, with the respective arguments and evidence to consider the case. If necessary, the Editorial Committee or one of its members who is an expert in the subject of the article in question will be asked for support. A response to the complaint will be given within a period of up to three months.

The journal is committed to rigorously investigating all claims and appeals, and taking appropriate measures to address any issues identified.

If a plagiarism complaint is received after the publication of an article in VIVAT ACADEMIA and is confirmed by the Editorial Board of the journal, that manuscript will be removed from the website of the published issue and from all repositories and databases where the mentioned plagiarized text is listed.

The journal is committed to publishing clear and detailed information on any possible conflicts of interest related to the published articles.

Journal policy on conflicts of interest

Both authors, reviewers, and editorial staff of the journal must disclose any conflicts of interest of any kind that may affect the publication's performance, such as personal conditions, employment relationship, funding or support with resources, etc.

The journal is committed to identifying and managing conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, and editors, and to avoiding any inappropriate influence on the evaluation and publication of articles.

In the case of reviewers, they must notify the journal's management if they encounter any impediment that directly affects ethical conduct, such as not properly submitting the anonymized article or describing data within the publication that could imply the identity of the signatories.

The journal is committed to publishing clear and detailed information on any possible conflicts of interest related to published articles.

Policy on data sharing and reproducibility

As part of our commitment to contribute to an increasingly open and free science, we urge our authors to deposit complementary materials or at least the underlying research data of publications in institutional or thematic repositories of open access federated in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The journal is committed to promoting transparency and reproducibility of research, encouraging the exchange of relevant data and materials for research, following international guidelines on data sharing, and ensuring that data are accessible and usable by other researchers, and promoting the use of standardized methods and protocols for research reproducibility.

Policy on Ethical Oversight

 

Formed by 5 members of its Scientific Committee and renewed every 4 calendar years (since 2010), the Ethics Committee will ensure to bring together positions between authors and reviewers in case of discrepancies, in its capacity as commissioned by the Publisher.

Authors may refer to it by email at its address: editor@vivatacademia.net, and 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 any proposal, it will act ex officio upon its discovery, in order to clarify the situation, applying an ethical code that corresponds to that of the British organization COPE (Committee On Publication Ethics), available on its website: publicationethics.org.

Its decisions will be final.

The journal is committed to ensuring that all published research meets ethical and legal standards, and to requiring authors to provide evidence that they have obtained approval from the corresponding ethics committees.

Intellectual property policy

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication of the authorized work simultaneously under an attribution license from Creative Commons, which allows others to share the work as long as both the authorship of the work and its initial publication in this journal are recognized.

Once the article has been published, either in its final version or in the pre-publication version, the non-exclusive distribution of the published version of the journal (e.g., publishing it in an institutional repository or in a book) may be carried out, with recognition of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors will be allowed to publish their work in institutional repositories or on their own website once it has been approved for publication, as it can generate productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of the published work.

The journal is committed to informing authors of any intellectual property issues identified during the editorial process and to taking appropriate measures to resolve them.

Policy for post-publication discussions and corrections.

It is the editorial policy of the journal to consider the refutations made of published works and, if appropriate, to publish them, subject to peer review, provided that they are well-founded and motivated, and provide explicit evidence of the error existing in the original article. The review of such refutations will be carried out by the same team of reviewers who carried out the evaluation of the original article.

Complaints, disagreements, and other matters related to published contributions should be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief through the journal's official email editor@vivatacademia.net. The journal will provide an adequate forum for discussion and scientific debate on published articles, including the publication of letters to the editor and expert comments.

We show below a summary of these policies for editors, authors, and reviewers:

Editor and Editorial Board Responsibilities:

• Ensure the confidentiality of author's data during the review process.
• Ensure custody of non-accepted texts and explain the method of their destruction.
• Define and explain the acceptance criteria of articles for review.
• Avoid preferential treatment to the detriment of other authors.
• Have no conflict of interest in relation to the presented texts.
• Not make any use of the texts or the data presented in them beyond publishing them.
• Establish clear and objective review criteria to avoid subjectivity of reviewers.
• Establish clear deadlines to respond to authors regarding the acceptance or non-acceptance of the text.
• Review suspected plagiarism incidents and resolve any conflicts of interest.
• Evaluate manuscripts solely on their intellectual content, regardless of the race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic origin, nationality, or political philosophy of the authors.
• Respect deadlines: editors are primarily responsible for meeting the time limits for reviews and the publication of accepted work, to ensure the rapid dissemination of results. They are committed to meeting the published deadlines (maximum of 30 days for estimation/rejection from receipt of the manuscript on the Review Platform and a maximum of 100 days from the start of the scientific review process by experts). Likewise, accepted work will not remain unpublished in endless waiting lists beyond the fair time for publication in the next issue. In VIVAT ACADEMIA, therefore, bags of work on waiting lists will be avoided.
• Not publish work not approved by designated peer review to maintain a standard of quality required in high scientific prestige journals. Thus, the author will always know that publishing means clear support for their research career.

Responsibilities of the Authors:

• Originality: Ensure the originality of the work and that it has not been previously published elsewhere.
• Truthfulness: Provide truthful data and demonstrate that it has been technically collected correctly.
• Plagiarism or self-plagiarism: Do not engage in total or partial plagiarism of other works that have already been published.
• Authorship: Confirm that the authors who sign the article are the actual authors. The author's condition implies active participation in the realization of the source work of the article submitted, in the drafting of the text, and in its revisions.
• Conflict of interests: Declare any commercial association that may pose a conflict of interest in connection with the submitted article.
• Sources: Indicate the sources of information used and differentiate between those that have been used directly from those that have been used indirectly. The authors are responsible for obtaining the necessary permissions to partially reproduce material (text, tables, or figures) from other publications and to cite their source correctly.
• In the event that the article is accepted, the authors must commit to making the modifications within the stipulated timeframe.
• In cases where it is considered appropriate, present documentation that ensures that minimal ethical criteria have been followed in the research, such as informed consent.
• Access and retention: If the editors deem it appropriate, the authors of the articles should also make the sources or data on which the research is based available, which can be kept for a reasonable period of time after publication and possibly made accessible.
• Errors in published articles: When an author identifies a significant error or inaccuracy in their article, they must immediately inform the editors of the journal and provide them with all the necessary information to list the relevant corrections at the bottom of the same article.
• Responsibility: All authors accept responsibility for what has been written. The authors also commit to having conducted a review of the most current and relevant scientific literature on the analyzed topic, taking into account the different knowledge currents in a pluralistic way.
• As this is a publication governed by the Creative Commons Attribution/Non Commercial 4.0 International, the author assigns copyright and publication rights to the journal through this system of public intellectual property access free of charge, by signing the originality letter and assignment of rights that can be found on the journal's website.
• Gender equality: The authors should use inclusive language and comply with the recommendations that may arise during the editorial process of the manuscript to ensure that the text is not sexist.

Responsibilities of Reviewers:

• Conduct a fair and objective review of the articles.
• Respect of deadlines: Reviewers who do not feel competent in the subject matter to be reviewed or who cannot complete the evaluation within the scheduled time will immediately notify the editors. Reviewers commit to evaluating the works in the shortest possible time to respect the delivery deadlines, since in "VIVAT ACADEMIA" the limits of custody of manuscripts waiting are finite and inflexible out of respect for the authors and their works.
• Explain clearly the arguments of their evaluation.
• Do not accept articles to review in which there may be any conflict of interest that limits their objectivity (for example, being a stakeholder in the research presented in the article, maintaining a personal or familial relationship with the authors of the text, or being in a dispute situation against the article or the person or group presenting it).
• Maintain confidentiality about the information and data of the evaluated articles.
• Text visualization: Reviewers commit to accurately indicating the bibliographic references of fundamental works possibly forgotten by the author. The reviewer must also inform the editors of any similarity or overlaps of the manuscript with other published works.
• Evaluate manuscripts only for their intellectual content, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic origin, nationality, or political philosophy of the authors.

Ethical Code and Artificial Intelligence

Ethics in scientific writing is a crucial topic for the scientific community and society at large. Scientific writing is an activity that involves the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and therefore, must be carried out with integrity and transparency. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool that is increasingly being used in scientific research, and therefore, its use should also be guided by ethical principles.

When it comes to the use of AI in scientific writing, it is important that researchers are transparent about how the technology is being used and how the results are being interpreted. AI algorithms can be useful for processing large amounts of data and identifying patterns and trends, but they can also lead to errors if not used appropriately. Researchers must be clear about how the algorithms are being used and how the results are being interpreted, and they must ensure that any automation does not harm the integrity of the research.