SEECI is committed to meeting and maintaining standards of ethical behaviour at all stages of the publication process. We are in accordance with industry associations, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Elsevier's Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK), which set standards and provide guidelines for best practices to meet these requirements.

Policy on authorship and contributions

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

As a measure to avoid the exchange of citations and the attribution of authorship that does not correspond, the journal has decided to include in its template for articles the section on Author Contributions, in accordance with the CRedit Taxonomy, therefore, at the end of the bibliography, all the contributions made by each author, both to the research and to the writing of the article, must be set out, respecting the structure proposed, and all the contributions made by each author, both to the research and to the writing of the article. In the case of articles by a single author, the bibliography is not valid, as it is understood that all the related points correspond to the same author. 

Code of good practice

Revista de comunicación de la SEECI by this code of ethics declares its good intentions to commit both authors and reviewers, as well as internally, its editorial team and members of its Scientific and Ethics Committees to this code.

Therefore, this code has to be endorsed by all those involved in the publication of scientific papers in this journal.

Authors:

Because this publication is open access, free in publication and in reading, governed by the Creative Commons Attribution / Non Commercial 4.0 International, the author assigns the copyright and publishing of the journal in accord with this intellectual property system of free public access by signing the text of the letter of originality available on the web of this publication.

The author or authors agree not to misrepresent authorship, not accepting as authors persons who have not been actively involved in the generation of the article presented.

Declare the article’s title and summary to be governed by truthfulness and rigor, avoid citations ‘done as a favor,’ and declare the exact provenance of the work’s contents (doctoral thesis, research project, teaching experience...)

They are obliged not to commit plagiarism, defined as the appropriation of texts by other authors without their consent and without citing their source, even if the permission has been expressed by these third-party authors. They also agree not to include in the submitted texts other texts already created by themselves, avoiding more than 15% of coincidence between a previous text and the one submitted. There are computer programs that with a low error rate weigh the percentage of matches of comparative texts that apply to the works submitted to this journal. The editors use in each article two of them: www.crossref.org/crosscheck/index.html, www.grammarly.com,  www.copyscape.com/online-plagiarism/, www.plagium.com, y www.plagiarisma.net; and whenever a level of coincidence greater than 20% is detected in any of them, the text will be passed through two more. If the level of coincidence persists, the journal's Ethics Committee will act to elucidate the case.

The proposed article must be original and not be submitted simultaneously to another publication or have been published previously in any medium. Reformulations of previous research lines and updates of published past work in order to complete the investigation are acceptable. Also appropriate is previously unpublished work properly updated from presentations at scientific congresses or only available in conference proceedings, specifying the origin of the material to the evaluating Editorial Board of our journal.

The author or authors are exclusively responsible for the statements made in their article to avoid any conflict of interest between the Revista de comunicación de la SEECI and third parties or institutions.

As for the materials used in the article, the authors agree to request the necessary permissions for the reproduction of texts, illustrations, video, audio, and other documentary sources whose publication requires prior authorization in order not to violate the legally recognized copyright. The author/s are legally responsible for not infringing the copyright derived from the misuse of their sources.

There are no commitments or financial obligations with state or private organizations that may affect the content, results or conclusions of this publication.

In the case of a research article derived from a very long investigation, and given the limitations inherent in a research paper , the results can be published in a series of articles as parts 1, 2, and 3.

Following the recommendations of APEI Reposrt on publication in scientific journals (Baiget and Torres -Salinas, 2013) which cites the work of Bebeau and Davis (1996), it is objectionable for authors to:

- Cite sources without being consulted

- Misinterpret previous works consulted

- Ignore data that contradicts or disagrees with the conclusions of the article

- Release scientific results prematurely, before peer review

- Keep research findings secret

- Hide data and methods which would permit the review of the experiments employed or the reworking of interpretive theories

- Not save for viewing the raw data of the field research

- Accredit false or untested authorship

 All the aforementioned is required in a reliable manner by the editor of the journal and stands as a commitment of mandatory compliance by the authors, so that the fact of applying with a work for publication means accepting these terms. Failure to do so is tantamount to waiving the evaluation of the article and means that it cannot be published again in the journal within 4 calendar years of the submission.

Editors:

On the part of the publisher, in this case the Sociedad Española de Estudios de la Comunicación Iberoamericana, (SEECI) ethical commitment lies in:

- Not publishing work not approved by peer review designated for that purpose to maintain the required criteria of quality in prestigious scientific journals. So the author will always know that the act of publishing is a clear support for his research.

- Avoiding enhanced self-citations (citations of articles from the journal) nor directly or indirectly manipulate (by pressuring the authors) to cite work of interest to the journal in order to improve its position in reference impact indexes.

- To maintain free access to the network of published work and to inform the author of the status of the evaluation from the time of receiving the proposal until final acceptance or rejection, either with or without modifications.

Reviewers:

The evaluation system is based on arbitration of an article by two blind peer reviewers. In case of disagreement between these two initial reviewers, a third will be assigned. To ensure anonymity, if authorship is accidentally discovered, either because of the subject matter or the author's way of writing, the reviewer must renounce the evaluation only if he is prejudiced about this author. Knowing who submitted the article does not imply that the reader personally knows the author or has a positive or negative predisposition towards him or her. That is to say, conflicts of interest will be avoided.

Also reviews should be made within a maximum of 60 days from the submission of the work. If there is absolute disagreement between the two reviewers, a third opinion will be requested and the possibility of the tiebreaker option ' publishable with improvements ’; the new term for the reassessment of such improvements shall be 15 days from their submission by the author.

The reviewers undertake not to publicly disclose that they are carrying out a review to avoid conflicts of interest.

Good Conduct Committee of the journal:

Formed by five members of the Scientific Committee and renewed every four years (since 2010), the committee will ensure agreement between authors and reviewers if discrepancies arise, as commissioned by the Editor.

The authors can refer to the editor by e-mail to this address: revista@seeci.net. They will be answered within one month of receiving the mail.

When irregularities occur or there are doubts about a proposal, once these irregularities are detected, in order to clarify the situation, an official code of ethics will be applied which corresponds to the following flow chart taken as an international reference, among other existing codes, and created by the British agency COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), available on its website: www.publicationethics.org

Their decisions are final.

Complaints and appeals policy

Complaints from authors will be received as long as they are well-founded, and will be dealt with as far as possible following the guidelines and diagrams recommended by COPE, as well as the internal rules of the Journal. In no case will the complaint resolution process involve revealing the identity of reviewers.

Any complaint about an evaluation process will be dealt with as long as the author identifies possible errors in the review. At no time will the suitability of the reviewer be questioned. Complaints will be addressed to the editor, with the respective argumentation and evidence to consider the case. If necessary, the support of the Editorial Board or one of its members who is an expert on the subject of the article in question will be requested. A response to the complaint will be given within a period of up to three months.

If a report of plagiarism is received after the publication of an article in SEECI, and this is verified by the Editorial Board of the Journal, the manuscript will be removed from the web page of the published issue and from all repositories and databases in which the plagiarised text appears.

Journal policy on conflicts of interest

Authors, reviewers and technical editorial staff of the journal must declare if there is any kind of conflict of interest of any kind that may affect the performance of the publication, for example, personal conditions, employment relationship, funding or support with resources, etc.

In the case of reviewers, they must notify the journal's management if they find any impediment that directly affects the ethical conduct to be practised, such as, for example, that the anonymised article was not properly sent or that data is described in the publication that could suggest who the signatories of the article are.

Data exchange and reproducibility policy

As part of our commitment to contributing to an increasingly open and free science, we encourage our authors to deposit supplementary materials—or at least the research data underlying their publications—in institutional or thematic open-access repositories federated within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), as promoted by the international GO FAIR initiative.

Policy on Ethical Oversight

The SEECI Journal of Communication guarantees transparency and integrity in scientific publication through ethical oversight guidelines. Complaints from authors will be dealt with if substantiated, following COPE guidelines and the journal's rules. The identity of the reviewers will not be revealed and only complaints that identify errors in the evaluation will be accepted, without questioning the competence of the reviewer. Complaints should be addressed to the editor with documentary evidence and will be resolved within a maximum of three months.

The Ethics Committee will act in cases of malpractice, such as plagiarism, which, if confirmed after publication, will lead to the withdrawal of the article. Self-plagiarism of more than 20% is prohibited and will be verified by means of specialized tools. All participants in the editorial process must declare conflicts of interest that may compromise the impartiality of the publication.

Authors must guarantee scientific rigor, avoiding practices such as citation of sources not consulted, manipulation of data or attribution of false authorship. Failure to comply with these rules will result in immediate exclusion from the evaluation process and a four-year ban from publication in the journal.

Intellectual property policy

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication of the authorised work simultaneously under a Creative Commons attribution licence which allows others to share the work as long as both authorship of the work and initial publication in this journal are acknowledged.

Once the article has been published either in its final version or in the advance publication version, non-exclusive distribution of the published version of the journal (e.g., publication in an institutional repository or in a book) may be made, with acknowledgement 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 this may generate productive exchanges, as well as earlier and higher citation of the published work.

Policy for post-publication discussion and corrections

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

Complaints, disagreements and other matters relating to published contributions should be sent to the Chief Editor via the journal's official mailing address (editor@seeci.net).

Below is a summary of these for editors, authors and reviewers:

Responsibilities of the Editor and Editorial Board

• Ensure the confidentiality of the authors' data in the review process.

• Ensure the safekeeping of unaccepted texts and specify how they are to be destroyed.

• Define and make explicit the criteria for acceptance of articles for review.

• Avoid favourable treatment to the detriment of other authors.

• Have no conflict of interest in relation to the texts presented.

• Not to make any use of the texts or the data presented therein other than for publication.

• Establish clear and objective review criteria to avoid reviewer subjectivity.

• Establish clear deadlines for responding to authors on the acceptance or non-acceptance of the text.

• Review suspected incidents of plagiarism and resolve any conflicts of interest.

• Evaluate manuscripts solely on their intellectual content, regardless of the race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnicity, nationality, or political philosophy of the authors.

• Respect for deadlines: the editors are fully responsible for complying with the time limits for reviews and publication of accepted papers, in order to ensure rapid dissemination of their results. They undertake to comply with the published deadlines (maximum 30 days in the estimation/rejection from the receipt of the manuscript in the Review Platform and maximum 100 days from the start of the scientific peer review process). Likewise, papers will not remain unpublished in infinite waiting lists beyond the time required for their publication in the next issue. Therefore, SEECI will avoid waiting lists of papers.

• Not to publish papers that have not been approved by peer reviewers appointed for this purpose in order to maintain the quality criteria required by journals of high scientific prestige. In this way, the author will always know that the fact of publishing is a clear support for his or her research career.

Responsibilities of the Authors

• Originality: To ensure the originality of the work and that it has not already been published elsewhere.

• Truthfulness: Provide truthful data and show that it has been collected in a technically correct manner.

• Plagiarism or self-plagiarism: Do not plagiarise in whole or in part from other published works.

• Authorship: Confirm that the authorship of the text really belongs to the persons who sign it. The status of author implies active participation in carrying out the work that is the source of the article submitted, in the drafting of the text and in its revisions.

• Conflict of interest: Declare any business association that may involve a conflict of interest in connection with the submitted item.

• Sources: Indicate the sources of information used and differentiate between those that have been used directly and those that have been used indirectly. Authors are responsible for obtaining the appropriate permissions to partially reproduce material (text, tables or figures) from other publications and for citing the source correctly.

• If the article is accepted, the authors must undertake to make the modifications within the stipulated period.

• Where appropriate, provide documentation to ensure that minimum ethical standards have been followed in the research, such as informed consent.

• Access and retention: If deemed appropriate by the editors, authors of articles should also make available the sources or data on which the research is based, which can be retained for a reasonable period of time after publication and possibly made accessible.

• Errors in published articles: When an author identifies a major error or inaccuracy in his/her article, he/she should immediately inform the editors of the Journal and provide them with all the information necessary to list the relevant corrections at the bottom of the article.

• Responsibility: All authors accept responsibility for what has been written. The authors also undertake that a review of the most current and relevant scientific literature on the subject analysed has been carried out, taking into account the different currents of knowledge in a pluralistic manner.

• As this is a publication governed by Creative Commons Attribution/Non Commercial 4.0 International, the author assigns the copyright and publication rights to the Journal through this free access public intellectual property system, by signing the text of the letter of originality that can be found on the Journal's website.

• Gender equality: Authors should use inclusive language and should abide by any recommendations that may arise during the editorial process of the manuscript to ensure that the text presents gender-neutral language.

Responsibilities of Reviewers

• Make a fair and objective review of the articles.

• Respect for deadlines: Any reviewer who does not feel competent in the subject matter to be reviewed or who is unable to complete the evaluation within the scheduled time will immediately notify the editors. The reviewers undertake to evaluate the papers in the shortest possible time in order to respect the deadlines, given that in "SEECI" the limits of custody of manuscripts awaiting review are finite and inflexible out of respect for the authors and their work.

• Clearly state the arguments for your assessment.

• Do not accept articles for review where there may be a conflict of interest that limits objectivity (for example, being a stakeholder in the research presented in the article, having a personal or kinship relationship with the authors of the text, or being in a situation of dispute against the article or the person or group submitting it).

• Maintain the confidentiality of the information and data of the evaluated articles.

• Text display: Reviewers undertake to accurately indicate bibliographic references to key works possibly overlooked by the author. The reviewer must also inform the editors of any similarities or overlaps of the manuscript with other published works.

• Evaluate manuscripts solely on their intellectual content, regardless of the race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnicity, nationality, or political philosophy of the authors.

Code of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

Ethics in scientific writing is a crucial issue for the scientific community and for 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 must also be guided by ethical principles.

When it comes to the use of AI in science writing, it is important for researchers to be 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 for identifying patterns and trends, but they can also lead to errors if not used properly. Researchers must be clear about how the algorithms are being used and how the results are being interpreted, and must ensure that any automation does not undermine the integrity of the research.