Ethical Commitment and Bad Practices Agreement

EstuDAv ensures that editors, reviewers, and authors rigorously follow international ethic standards during the review and publication process. We declare that our procedures follow the recommendations published by the Commitee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The received manuscripts will be subjected to a plagiarism check process (using the Turnitin platform), double-blind peer review, control of falsification data (data obtained, tables, graphs, images), and respect and secrecy guarantee on people used on the research, rejecting in this sense manuscripts where there is evidence of improper use of animals, including human beings.

Each manuscripts sent to EstuDAv must have the following rules:

CONSENT: All authors must give their consent for the sending and publication of the article submitted for evaluation. 

CONTRIBUTION OF THE AUTHORS: All authors who contributed significantly to the manuscript must be detailed, without omitting any author. The order of author's names must be placed according to their collaboration in the study, from most to least contribution. 

ORIGINALITY OF THE RESEARCH: The research is original, has not been previously published and has not been simultaneously sent for evaluation to another journal. In case that the research have sources from previous publications, it must have the consent for its reproduction. 

QUOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY: All information included in the manuscript coming from previous studies, must be correctly quoted and referenced following EstuDAv instructions. 

SUGGESTED REVIEWERS: None of the suggested reviewers have any work, professional and personal relation with the authors.  

ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OF PUBLICATION: Authors must have read the recommendations of the Committee on Publications Ethics (Committee on Publication Ethics) and declare that these principles are met. Any work that does not conform to these recommendations and that malpractice is proven will be eliminated or retracted, depending on the state of the manuscript at the time of detecting ethical misconduct.

If the manuscript does not meet the indicated criteria, any author of the manuscript can notify a Revista EstuDAv to withdraw the publication.

ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OF EstuDAv

1. Mandatory institutional authorization

Approval of the Ethics Committee of the sponsoring institution is required for articles that belong to any of the following modalities: (a) Research carried out on human beings or (b) Research that directly uses human biological material or human data susceptible to be identificated.

2. Informed Consent

In researches carried out with human beings (including experiments and interviews), the authors must have the Informed Consent signed by the interviewees and participants of the study. If the editor or a reviewer request it, the author must provide it.

3. Incentives for participation in the study

Researchers must make every effort to avoid offering excessive or inappropriate incentives to the people involved in their research. However, economic incentives can be made to the participants for the time spent, depending on the case.

4. Research deception

Researchers must avoid all kinds of misleading techniques or information in order to deliberately mislead participants.

5. Closure of investigation

Once the study is finished, the researcher must offer the participants results and conclusions of the study, taking the necessary measures to avoid misunderstandings.

6. Ethical principles

a) Culture and heritage: Researchers must have, at all times, maximum respect for objects that have cultural significance and are part of a country's heritage. If the country, for example, prohibits the publication of pictures of this heritage, this must be respected by the researchers. In this case, approved manuscripts for publication in EstuDAv should not include any kind of related images. In other cases, in those countries where the visibility of heritage is supported and promoted, such images may be published.

b) Researches with animals: Experiments with animals are carried out in three fields: teaching, industry and research. The use of animals in research is a privilege that must be carefully reserved in order to ensure relief for humans and animals from disease and pain. Ignore the pain of the animal in this process is irresponsable and unethical. Anyone and everyone who uses laboratory animals in their research must keep a premise: respect for life, for the pain or suffering to wich they may be subjected in the corresponding studies. Research with animals mus consider respect for the 4Rs (Replacement: seek alternative methods to the involvement of animals as much as possible; Reduction: try to reduce the number of animals in experiments; Refinement: to establish methods to consider animal welfare, and Recycling: to use the animals more than once on other works). The authors must have the ethical and legal approval by the supporting institution that endorses the research if requested. 

7. REPORT OF THE RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATIONS

Researchers can't, in any way, invent data or falsify figures. This type of conduct is considered a serious breach of professional practice and represents a reprehensible practice contrary to all intellectual and academic ethics. Besides, if a report with adultered data is published, it is a falsification of a public document. If errors are discovered, they must be publicly corrected.

8. RESEARCH INTEGRITY

EstuDAv ethics rules has the following criteria:

a) Misbehavior: Actions or omissions related to devising, organizing, carrying out, evaluating, or requesting research projects that deliberately or carelessly, may distort research results, provide misleading information about the personal contributions or violate other rules of the professional task of researchers. If misbehavior is suspected, an investigation will proceed. 

b) Reports of irregularities: All members of the Editorial Board of EstuDAv can receive reports of irregularities complaints made by indentified persons or anonymously. Complaints must include evidence to start an investigation. 

c) Correct use of images: EstuDAv suggests that all articles must show their results in an optimum mix of text, pictures, and graphics to facilitate the research comprehension. Inappropriate use of images is not acceptable, because it induces misleading interpretations. EstuDAv does not accept falsification or image manipulation practices.

d) Plagiarism: Plagiarism is a practice contrary to professional ethics and is not accepted in any way in the scientific community. EstuDAv works with the Turnitin platform, software provided by Universidad de Santiago de Chile, to verify eventual plagiarism. If an author sends a plagiarized text, will be severely reprimanded. 

Plagiarism is not only a full copy of an article. Plagiarism can be also de incurred through clumsy or careless handling of information. For this reason, special attention should be paid to the final version of the article, considering the quotation norms requested by EstuDAv, available in “Guidelines to authors” in   http://www.revistas.usach.cl/ojs/index.php/ideas/about/submissions. For example, when a text is literally quoted, it must be cleary differentiated, written between quotation marks, naming the authors. The text can also be paraphrased, giving always credit to the authors. Other form of plagiarism is the use of graphics without giving credit to their creators. It is also a misconduct to use images without authorization. 

e) Data redundancy: Researchers must not publish previously published information as original. Likewise, authors cannot submit a text on two journals simultaneously. If the EstuDAv committee finds a situation of this type, the manuscript will be rejected. Translations of published articles cannot be submitted as new material. In case of a translation of an article of high interest, it can be published as translation, with due clarification. 

9. EDITORIAL STANDARDS AND PROCESSES:

a) Authorship: the role of the author or co-author of research is also adjusted to ethical and professional rules. To hold the category of author or co-author of an article, it is mandatory to participate in at least two of the four phases of a project: planning, data collection, results from  analysis, and preparation of the manuscript. All the authors of a scientific article must contribute significantly to the development of the research. 

b) Authorship disputes: If EstuDAv committee suspects or receives reports of authorship problems, it will request background information to the author or authors to make a decision. 

c) Funding: All funding sources must be mentioned. It is particularly important to indicate the research project in which the text is included and the corresponding data. 

d) Peer review: Original manuscripts, full or short versions, and reviews, are initially evaluated according to EstuDAv criteria, indicated in the Instructions for the Authors. This first review is made by the Director, Chief Editors, and Section Editors. Once approved in the first review, manuscripts are evaluated by two or more reviewers who are chosen by their expertise on the manuscript's topic. 

e) Publication deadline: From the moment the article is submitted to EsduDAv until the first decision is made (acceptance, rejection or acceptance with modifications), the Editorial Board has an average time of two and four months. If the article is accepted with modifications, the term can be extended from two to four months, considering the time that the author requires to prepare the final version and for the Editorial Board to review it again.

f) Rules for articles by the editorial board: The Editorial Board (Director, Editorial Committee, Editors-in-chief and Section Editors) are not involved in any decision regarding their own manuscripts submitted to this journal. EstuDAv has a large editorial body, which allows it yo have enough academics and committed professionals to evaluate, manage and edit the articles recieved without incurring inbreeding or conflicts of interest. Likewise, to reinforce this criterion, as of March of 2021 the editorial procedure management system has been adopted through the OJS platform, which facilitates the transparency of these procedures.

g) Conflict of interest: Editors, authors, and reviewers must disclose any conflict of interest that might affect their ability to present or review a manuscript objectively. Conflicts of interest include financial, family, personal, political, or religious interests.

h) Corrections: when errors are detected in an article published in EstuDAV, which affect the interpretation of the results, it will be the duty of readers, authors, and editors to notify the editorial staff through a Letter to the Editor. The Editorial Board has the obligation to verify the information and contrast it with the author and the corresponding evidence. If the veracity of the complaint is confirmed, the corrections will be published. If the errors are relevant enough to invalidate the work, the possibility of retracting the published manuscript will be considered.

i) Retraction of a manuscript: The retraction of an article is one of the most serious sanctions that the Editorial Board of EstuDAv can take in relation to an article published in the journal. This extreme measure is reached when the reported errors may affect the interpretation of the data. This measure become more serious when the information presented in the work is fraudulent or falsified; when the data is fictitious; when the study cannot be reproduced, or in cases of serious ethical misconduct.

j) Withdrawal of a manuscript: the moval, deletion, or concealment of an article is only allowed when there is a case involving legal infringements, defamation or other limitations of a legal nature, as well as when there are false or inaccurate data. In such cases, a withdrawal statement  will be issued. Another particular case of withdrawal occurs when proven ethical misconduct has been committed but the article has not yet been published; in this case, only the authors are notified of the withdrawal of their manuscript from the review process.

10. COPYRIGHT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The author must sign a document ceding the patrimonial rights to EstuDAv and send it together with the submission of their manuscript. If the manuscript is not accepted for publication, this assignment is void and the manuscript released for publication, if the auhor so decides, in another publication medium. Moral rights always remain with the author, without restrictions. Once published in EstuDAv, the article can be re-published, in whole or in part, indicating thar it was originally published in EstuDAv.

11. PEER REVIEWERS

The original manuscripts are initially evaluated according to the EstuDAv criteria, indicated in the Instructions for Authors; after this compliance, the manuscripts are evaluated by two or more reviewers, who are chosen according to their expertise in the topic of the manuscript. The participation of the reviewers in all cases is anonymous and ad honorem. Editorials and letters to the editor are evaluated only by an editor, except in cases that require an evaluation by an external reviewer.