Good Publication Practices

Comunicación y Medios undertakes a rigorous review process of manuscripts to avoid malpractice. We promote high scientific and ethical standards of quality and intellectual honesty as a central part of our editorial work. 

Comunicación y Medios assumes an impartial position in regards to published texts, whose authors are responsible for the content. The journal seeks to contribute to public debates, visibilizing and incentivizing different intellectual positions, different methodological approaches, and diverse research problems and objects. 

Publishing implies different functions. Everyone who intervenes in the process (editors and proofreaders, authors, peer reviewers) are committed to an ethical conduct in accordance with their participation.   

A low ethical standard constitutes malpractice, negatively affects research, the published text, and, therefore, the quality of the publication as a whole. The following recommendations seek to prevent malpractice in the process of blind review, edition, and publication in Comunicación y Medios. 

Ethical Responsibilities and Code of Conduct for Editors: 

The General Editor is ultimately responsible for deciding which articles, essays, and reviews will be published after having undergone a blind review process. To this effect, he will count on the collaboration of reviewers and the advice of the Editorial Committee. The journal’s editor will guarantee that the published content responds to the highest ethical standards in its review, edition, and publication. 

The Editorial Committee must not only ensure that the manuscript is original and unpublished, but also that it has not been uploaded to informal platforms such as personal websites, social media, or blogs. The proper use of citation will also be verified. Comunicación y Medios employs a software specialized in the detection of plagiarism and self-plagiarism. All analyzed articles that have a coincidence percentage higher than 40% of content available in other sources will be returned to the authors. 

The editorial team treats all reviewed manuscripts with the proper confidentiality. 

All articles, essays, and reviews are evaluated by at least two duly qualified reviewers. When the author is affiliated with the Universidad de Chile, which publishes Comunicación y Medios, her or his manuscript will be reviewed by referees from outside this institution. 

Our publication discourages malpractice in authorship and co-authorship, such as ghost authors or invited authors. 

When publication malpractice is identified, the Editorial Committee is obliged to reject the corresponding manuscript and follow up on the case. If there is enough evidence, the Editorial Committee will make a public announcement of the situation. 

The Editorial Committee guides the evaluation process, specifying what is expected of the blind peer reviews: confidentiality in the process, review request, suggested deadlines, access to evaluation guidelines, access to and tutorial of the journal’s online platform, receipt of review, and certificate of collaboration. Comunicación y Medios has an OJS platform and a work system that guarantees a transparent process and protects the identity of peer reviewers.  

The Editorial Committee reserves the right to edit evaluations before sending them to authors in order to promote respect and encourage legitimate criticism, removing comments that may be hurtful, offensive, or defamatory and which contribute little to strengthening academic work. 

Comunicación y Medios recognizes the work of reviewers, publishing their full names and affiliations. By doing so, we encourage the recognition of blind peer review activities as a constitutive part of academic work.  

Comunicación y Medios will provide a reasonable deadline for authors to review and correct their manuscripts based on the evaluations and the Editorial Committee’s recommendations. 

Ethical Responsibilities and Code of Conduct for Reviewers:

Comunicación y Medios prefers constructive criticism. Evaluations must be impartial and clearly articulated. A negative criticism must explain the manuscript’s weakness so authors comprehend the basis of rejection or the suggested modifications in order to strengthen their work. Any criticism or disqualification toward the author is inappropriate.  

Each reviewer will consign their recommendations according to the following categories: Accept, Reject, and Accept conditionally with revisions noted by reviewers.

The review process must be rigorous and consider questions of ethics in the investigation and in the field, eventual errors or weakness of the study or article, shortcomings in theoretical focuses, or inadequate methodological perspectives. It is also important for reviewers to note redundancies, plagiarism, or self-plagiarism. 

Ethical Responsibilities and Code of Conduct for Authors:

Authorship:

Authorship refers to the individual(s) who are responsible for writing, designing, and/or developing the analysis of an article. The author is not the person who compiles data for an article. When submitting the manuscript, authors must decide the order of the signatories. 

It is mandatory to credit the participation of people who have contributed intellectually in the process of elaborating an article. To avoid conflicts in manuscript credits, roles must be specified from the outset of a research project. Comunicación y Medios will communicate with only one (1) author during the editorial process who will be responsible for correctly crediting the rest of the text’s authors. 

Authors must declare the sources of financing or support for research projects, if pertinent. 

Research Design:

We must carefully consider the ethical aspects of information in the field. Comunicación y Medios publishes articles that must be well founded, duly planned, and which specify the undertaken research process. 

Every investigation must certify that it adheres to ethical norms in its country or academic institution. If necessary, studies that involve human beings and, in particular, objects of study considered under special protection by ethical research standards, must explicitly indicate that they have approval from the corresponding ethical committees of their institutions or financial sources. 

Comunicación y Medios reserves the right to request the proper compliance of ethical approval at any moment in process of reviewing a manuscript.  

Regarding Published Content:

Falsification of data is a serious ethical violation. Presenting untruthful content in an article as if it were truthful will be considered serious misconduct. 

All methods must be duly referenced. The discussion section in a manuscript must notify any considered problem of bias and explain how it was addressed in the study’s design and interpretation. 

The manuscript must include details on research methods and processes in order to uphold transparency with the community in this field. 

Fraudulent or inexact affirmations constitute unethical conduct and are unacceptable. 

Authors are responsible for confirming that the article submitted to Comunicación y Medios has not been submitted or accepted elsewhere. They must ensure that no manuscript with identical or similar content exists in other sources. 

If the manuscript uses audiovisual, sound, or still image sources, whether digital or analogue, authors must specify how they accessed said sources and ensure that they have not infringed intellectual property rights.  

Comunicación y Medios guarantees that authors will have the opportunity to respond to eventual accusations of malpractice, whether minor, serious, or very serious. 

Plagiarism and Self-Plagiarism 

Plagiarism is unacceptable. Comunicación y Medios will reject any article that has been partially or fully published in another journal. Likewise, presenting the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical conduct. Comunicación y Medios will immediately reject any article that is found to be in said conditions. 

Information obtained privately, such as conversations, correspondences, or discussions with third parties, must not be used without the explicit authorization of the source. 

Self-plagiarism is considered the practice of reusing one’s own material already published without specifying the reference of the previous work, presenting it as if it were new and original. 

Withdrawal of Manuscripts 

If plagiarism or errors are detected in a manuscript, the journal can suggest corrections or determine that the article should be withdrawn. If the editorial team is aware of any accusation of malpractice in the investigation, it will treat the accusations appropriately and diligently. The journal is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies, if necessary. 

In the case of serious ethical violations by authors who have been proven to commit plagiarism or manipulated information, Comunicación y Medios will make a public declaration and will not accept articles by the responsible author or authors in the future. 

The journal will publish a statement discrediting the text with proper explanations. The action of discrediting a text must be taken promptly so that said work is not cited. Withdrawn articles will be preserved in an online edition of the journal, accompanied by a warning that the article has been discredited. 

Conflicts of Interest

External reviewers or editors must declare any conflict of interest that may influence their evaluation of an article. Individuals may have academic, financial, commercial, or political interests with authors of reviewed manuscripts. Omitting these interests is a practice that seriously violates the ethical norms of publication in Comunicación y Medios. 

Inclusive Language 

Comunicación y Medios uses and promotes inclusive language and is open to its plasticity. This means that when referring to groups (two or more people) that include women and men, we will use universal and gender-neutral words (for example: “the people participated,” “nursing staff,” “neighborhood friends,” “the office or management of the institution,” “professorship,” “citizenship”); or distinguishing the sex of the implicated persons (for example: “she and he,” “hers and his,” “women and men,” etc.), when it corresponds. Likewise, we will use the feminine of professional titles or activities (for example: “abogada” [lawyer], “lideresa” [leader], “jueza” [judge]). In the case of naming non-binary genders, we accept the limited use of inclusive signs such as “x” or “e” at the end of gendered words in Spanish. We will not use the following signs: “@” and “/” to include or distinguish sexes, since we believe that complicating legibility misses the point of visibilizing and, in the end, invisibilizes gender-discriminated subjects. When necessary, we will first use the feminine expression, such as, “las y los estudiantes” (the female and male students) or “women and men visited.”