Editorial policies

All articles are subject to an editorial and ethical review by members of the Editorial Board (Head Editor and/or Associate Editors and Secretary). This review includes at least verification of:

• The suitability of the topic for the Journal
• The originality, newness and interest in the topic approached
• The observation of the formal requirements
• The acceptance of the terms of publication
• The lack of any conflicts of interest and compliance with copyright regulations and the journal’s ethics standards

If a positive opinion is issued, it will be sent for anonymous scientific review using a “double-blind system”. A favourable opinion by two experts is required for a positive rating of each manuscript in this phase. In the event of a discrepancy, the director may request a review by a third reviewer.

Reviewers are independent of the Publisher and Editorial Board. Specific methodological reviews will be used for certain articles.

Once the external arbitration process has been completed, the Editorial Board will make the final decision as to the publication of the article based on the reviewers’ recommendations as follows:

• Reject the article.
• Accept it for publication after any suggestions have been implemented.
• Accept it for publication.

The final decision on whether or not to publish the manuscript shall be communicated to the author(s) exclusively in writing.

- Estimated time for the review and publication process

The estimated time for the review process is two to four months as there are usually 1 or 2 preliminary review rounds before the article is considered SUITABLE for publishing. The reviewer as well as the author have approximately 30 days per round to do their work. (This period is an estimate as it exclusively depends on the authors and reviewers involved with each article.)

Once an article is considered suitable for publication, the editing process takes approximately one to two months (includes the correction of syntaxis, translation and layout).

These periods are always subject to the Journal’s publication dates as it is a quarterly journal.

Plagiarism policy

 The Editorial Board is very strict about plagiarism. The magazine believes that the adoption of ideas and the work of others without giving them credit is unfair and dishonest. Copying a sentence from someone else's manuscript, or even your own that has been previously published, without proper citation is considered plagiarism for using your own words instead. The Editorial Board reserves the absolute authority to reject the process of reviewing a submitted manuscript if it is subject to minor or major plagiarism and may even cancel the publication following the complaint of the victim (s) of plagiarism. The journal provides its reviewers with iThenticate's Turnitin tool, developed to detect this malpractice.

Policy on negligence

    Methodology for unethical conduct 

• When misconduct or unethical actions are detected, they should be reported to the editor.
• Misconduct and unethical actions include, but are not limited to, the previously mentioned examples, such as plagiarism or falsification of research.
• The whistleblower must provide sufficient information and evidence to initiate an investigation. All complaints should be seriously considered and treated in a similar manner, until a corresponding outcome or agreement is reached. 

1) Investigation

• The editor is responsible for selecting the appropriate investigation method and may ask for advice of the Copywriting Board Editorial Board or the reviewer on making this choice.
• Evidence should be gathered in a way that avoids inflaming the situation and spreading accusations.

2) Consequence: (in order of increasing seriousness, these may be applied separately or in combination)

• Notification of the author or reviewer of a misunderstanding or misapplication of the journal's ethical standards in their article.
• Write a strongly worded letter or statement to the perpetrator explaining the unethical behaviour and issuing a warning.
• Publication of a formal observation with details of the misconduct.
• Publication of an editorial comment detailing the inappropriate behaviour.
• Formal withdrawal and removal of the papers in question from the journal, together with notification to: the author's supervisor or reviewer's department, the abstracting and indexing groups, and the journal's audience.
• Enforce a formal embargo on the author's submissions for a specified period of time.  

Correction, retraction and complaints policy

1) Correction of published work

Honest mistakes are part of the scientific and publication process, and these should be corrected when detected. Authors are requested to inform the editor of the Ibero-American Journal of Education of any factual error they have noticed in their article once it has been published. Corrections will be made as soon as possible, at the discretion of the Editorial Committee. 

2) Retraction of published work

RIE will consider retractions in cases of unethical research evidence, such as unreliable data or findings, plagiarism, duplicate publication, among others. All notices of retraction will explain why the article was retracted. In resolving disputes, we follow the COPE guidelines

Errata and retractions

The content of articles published in the journal can be corrected if, during the stages of revision or editing or even after publication, the author or editor discovers or is informed of errors not previously detected. Depending on the type, gravity and/or consequences of the error, the following options may be considered:

• Errata: refers to the correction of one or more errors despite which the paper can remain in publication.
• A retractionis the recognition of errors which are of sufficient gravity to invalidate the results or conclusions of the paper, and as such, the entire paper must be eliminated. Any article that has been shown to violate the journal's publication ethics statement in any way will be retracted.
• Retraction and republication:will be possible if the Editorial Board considers that it was an honest mistake (e.g., misclassification or miscalculation) that led to a major change in the direction or meaning of the results, interpretations or conclusions. In this case, a new review will be undertaken and reader will be informed of the scope of the changed made. 

All requests for errata and retractions should be sent to  rie@oei.int , with a description of the case and supporting information attached. These will be analysed in depth by the editor and the Editorial Team. For complex cases, the editor may request advice from experts to make decisions and provide ethical solutions for each case.

In every case, the journal will ensure that errors are corrected quickly. The journal will also communicate and detail changes and the dates on which they were made so readers are up to date with the corresponding modifications.        

Before requesting a correction or reporting an error, the following aspects should be taken into consideration:  

• Readers may report, in a single document, any errors they come across in a published paper. If a reader reports a substantial error in the content of a publication, the editor will examine the case to verify the situation. If an error is confirmed, the authors will be contacted to make the necessary changes and corrections and respond to the reader. If the reader is not satisfied with the response, direct contact between the reader and authors will be facilitated. In all cases, RIE will be informed of such communication.
• Corrections will not be accepted if they are related to the order of author’s names in a published article or to add or remove authors, because this aspect should be agreed upon before the manuscript is presented. If an author identifies a substantial error which requires the  retraction of a published article, the case must be supported in detail. For corrections or errata, the specific passages of text where the errors are located must be specified, and revised versions must be provided. The Editorial Board may consider a peer review of corrections. The corresponding author is responsible for clarifying errors for co-authors and coordinating the changes required by the journal. Responses to all errata and partial changes are notified personally to the senders. Additionally, all notifications of corrections will be made public on the website as well as in the following online edition of the journal. When the new edition comes out, the journal will provide clear details of the error and the changes made to the paper. Notifications of retraction should be clearly indicated in the retracted article and the reasons considered for its retraction.

3) Complaints

In case of disagreement, authors or reviewers can contact rieoei@oei.es , providing a description of the complaint and supporting arguments. The complaint should be clear, concrete, and include sufficient information to demonstrate a possible violation of the journal’s publication ethics statement. If possible, additional documentation should be attached with proof or evidence of the situation. The Journal can only receive complaints via email. The technical editor will analyse, address and appropriately respond to the complaint within a maximum period of three (3) working days. However, depending on the complexity of the complaint, the complainant may be informed that additional time is necessary for investigation.  The complainant must provide contact information (full name, email address and phone number) to send notifications and respond to the compliant or claim. For anonymous complaints, the response will be sent to email address from which the complaint was received. Depending on the nature and complexity of the complaint, the editorial team, editorial committee or expert staff will examine the case and decisions will be made according to  COPE  guidelines and recommendations. If necessary, the Journal can request further information and supporting documents to clarify the case. If it determines that the accusation is of substance and accurate, the investigation will be escalated to the legal system. Complaints outside of the journal’s jurisdiction (for example, personal complaints against authors, editors, peer reviewers or the editorial team) will be responded to indicating the reasons why the complaint falls outside of the remit of the journal. The journal will not undertake any investigation if a complaint is offensive, threatening or defamatory. Such complaints will be sent to the Legal Department of the Organisation of Ibero-American States and appropriate authorities. The journal may resort to laws, codes and regulations if a complainant continues to pursue an unfounded, false, or malicious complaint. In these cases, if the complainant's institutional affiliation is known, the institution may be notified of the complainant's behaviour.

Open access policy

RIE is free immediately after publication of each issue. RIE does not charge any fees for submitting work or any fees for publication.

The content is distributed through a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International   licence which allows users to copy, use, disseminate, transmit and publicly present the content whenever authorship is cited. Thus, the journal clearly endorses the Open Access (OAI) policies in line with the principles of the free access and exchange of knowledge promoted ever since the international movements contained in the Declarations of Budapest, Bethesda, Berlin, etc

Archiving policy

The journal has a policy for the preservation of its papers, which is based on storing information in commonly used formats. This increases the likelihood that when a format becomes obsolete there will still be programmes for its conversion: HTML and PDF are examples of these.

This journal forms part of the Public Knowledge Project’s Private LOCKSS Network (PKP-PLN), which generates a decentralised archiving system to create permanent journal archives for the preservation of original content and its restoration if necessary.  To do this is has a OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface, which allows its content to be gathered by other distribution systems such as libraries, digital repositories and harvesters.

In addition, the journal develops various processes to ensure the permanent accessibility of digital objects it hosts on its own servers:

• Monitoring of the technological environment to anticipate possible migrations of obsolete formats or software.
• Digital preservation metadata.
• DOI use.

The digital preservation and backup policy is periodically revised by the Organisation of Ibero-American States(OEI),  sponsor of the Ibero-American Journal of Education, securing the intellectual content of electronic records over long periods of time, maintaining their attributes such as integrity, authenticity, inalterability, originality, reliability and accessibility.

Copyrights policy

Any authors who publish with this journal accept the following terms:

1. Once any work is accepted for publication, it is understood that the author assigns the rights of reproduction and distribution to their article to Revista Iberoamericana de Educación for exploitation in all countries of the world in paper or any other magnetic, optical or digital format.
2. Author(s) shall maintain their copyrights and will guarantee the journal has the right to first publication of the work which will also be subject to the Creative Commons Attribution Licence allowing third parties to share the work whenever the author and first publication in this journal are cited.
3. The author(s) may sign other non-exclusive distribution licensing agreements for the version of the work published (i.e. deposit it with an institutional electronic archive or publish it in a monographic volume) as long as the initial publication in this journal is indicated.
4. Author(s) are allowed and advised to disseminate their work via the Internet (i.e. institutional electronic archives, repositories, libraries or at their own websites) which may create interesting exchanges and increase the citations for the published work. 

Conflict of interest disclosure policy

The authors of a manuscript, the journal editors who receive it and all reviewers (internal and external) must disclose any conflict of interest that may influence the manuscript or the review and approval thereof. If the authors declare a conflict of interest, the reviewers must be informed. At the same time, anyone asked to review a manuscript must recuse themselves if they have any conflict of interest with the authors or topic. The journal guarantees the most suitable reviewers will be chosen in terms of topic and academic compatibility.

In the event of a dispute, the Ibero-American Education Journal undertakes to issue a decision through its Editorial Board. This Board will be responsible for resolving these situations and taking reasonable measures to identify and prevent the publication of articles where poor research conduct has occurred. Under no circumstance will the Journal encourage such inappropriate conduct or knowingly allow such inappropriate conduct.

If the journal editor(s) gain knowledge of any accusation of poor research conduct, the editor shall process the accusations appropriately by retracting or correcting articles as necessary. Any corrections, clarifications, retractions or apologies necessary shall be published.

To settle controversies we follow the COPE guidelines where applicable.

Policy for good editorial practice in gender equality

In order to achieve a fairer and more inclusive society in terms of gender equity and equality at all levels, one of the priorities of the Ibero-American Journal of Education is to follow an editorial policy in favour of inclusive language in all its articles. To this end, it is recommended that authors use gender-neutral language such as: student body, teachers, learners, childhood, people, human being, academic staff, research staff, teaching team, etc.

In keeping with this, we are constantly striving to transform our editorial bodies and policies in order to promote gender equality, which we achieve through the following actions:

• More than 40% of our editorial team is female. Copywriting Board, Editorial Board and Scientific Council
• More than 40% of the reviewers for papers sent to the journal are female.
• The style guides include specific recommendations for the use of  gender inclusive languagein papers and published work.
• The journal includes the full name of the authors of published papers.
• In scientific papers, authors are requested to ensure that the source data of the research is gender-sensitive in order to allow for the identification of possible differences.

Authorship policy  (1)

The papers presented in the Ibero-American Journal of Education must be signed by all those who have made a significant contribution to the manuscript. That is, they have contributed significantly to the conception and design of the study, to the analysis and interpretation of the data, and have participated in the final drafting or revision of the manuscript. In this sense, authors are asked to send the  declaration of authorship signed through the platform when the manuscript is sent.

The order of authors should be established at the time the work is planned and roles and responsibilities are distributed. If the workload varies over the course of the paper’s development, the order should be altered to favour those who have taken on more work.

The order reflects the role and involvement that each of the authors has had in the development of the work and, although there is no written norm in this respect, the following conventions are increasingly assumed in the field of social sciences.

The first position corresponds to the main author of the document, the one who had the idea and developed it in all the phases of the document and was in charge of coordinating the work with the rest of the authors. They are usually also the person who has drafted the document, adapting the contributions of the rest.

The corresponding author is responsible for submitting the manuscript and communicating with the journal during the review process, and does not have to be the same as the primary author.

Sometimes, the last named author is the most established scientist of the group and/or principal investigator of the project funding the work and his/her task is to be a final reviewer of the manuscript submission.

The order of the remaining authors is decided in relation to their involvement in the work, with those who have made the most substantial contributions appearing first.

Often during the preparation of the manuscript, collaborators, such as paid research assistants or trainees, have been involved in data collection or data analysis. These collaborators should not be listed among the authors of the article if they have not contributed to the design of the study, and have not participated in the analysis of the data or in the writing of the manuscript. Their work should be recognised in the acknowledgments section.

If changes in authorship are requested after submission or publication of the paper, a letter of agreement to the changes signed by all authors must accompany the request.

[1] The authorship policy of the journal has been created following the  Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.