Author: Luis-Miguel Romero – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
Although the concept of “quality” comes from the latin qualitas (perfection), it is not less true that the word has taken a polysemy meaning and even subjective. However, regarding to scientific publications there exist several indicators and criteria that guarantee their scientific qualities. Among the most important we find:
- Impact and prestige: A journal gets the higher punctuation in these criteria when it locates within the indexes of quality most important for the scientific community (Journal Citation Reports and Scopus). However, there exist other seals or indexations that guarantee a fewer impact but that is in the path to obtaining it, like the Excellence seal FECYT, ERIH+ or the Emerging Citation Source Index.
- Visibility and access: The visibility relates with the facility of finding and reading a published article, while the access refers to the diffusion politics of the journal (open access, restricted access, payment access, etc.). In order to increase the visibility, the journals- like Comunicar- publish in several idiomatic versions, make an effort in the academic SEO, publish in several formats of inter-operability (PDF, EPub, HTML, XML), diffuse the preprint version of the article and are active in the academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley) and general (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube).
- Punctuality and seriousness: Maybe one the most important points of the scientific publications is the punctuality and the rigor in the revision times. The scientific publications are not anything without the authors and reviewers that trust in them, ergo is not trivial to accomplish with at least a prudential time to emit a report about the article. In this case Comunicar Journal keeps an honor code in evaluating an article in a maximum time of 100 days and of 30 days to emit the estimation or previous dismissal of the article (for not accomplishing the formal requirements or of thematic line).
- Rigorousness of the process: All the processes of quality scientific journals must be both auditable and transparent. In this sense, publications must have expert scientific reviewers in the subject of specialization and avoid endogamy at all costs.
- Ethics and commitment: The Editorial Board of a publication, as well as its Scientific Council and its Board of reviewers must understand the importance of taking care of aspects such as conflicts of interest, responsibility, confidentiality and honesty of their work, assuming objectivity and scientific rigor as a north.
- Editorial Management: The guarantee in the use of auditable systems (as the Open Journal System, ScholarOne, etc.) is an important point for the authors to follow the editorial process and make it possible changes in the shipment.
- Scientific community: The scientific community is the reason of living of every publication. The authors, reviewers, readers, sympathizers, members of the Scientific Council, of the Writing Board and of the Editorial Council must compose a great ecosystem of experts and referents of the theme for the journal to constitute in a meeting point of academic debate.
- Emerging technologies: The strategic use of social networks and the continue adaptation to new indicators (as AltMetrics), is necessary for the journal to get updated.
- Originality and progress: All the manuscripts of a publication must be unpublished, original and contribute in some way to the progress of the science, discipline or area of knowledge. In this sense it is vital to have plagiarism control systems (such as CrossCheck, SimilarityCheck, Turnitin, etc.) and a board of expert reviewers in each of the themes.
- The author as maximum: The author is the epicenter of all scientific publications, given that provides them of content and offers its studies for the diffusion.
In Comunicar Journal we have prepared the next explicative video about the editorial criteria.
