Editorial policy
1. EDITORIAL and ETHICS Policy of the RAAB
The RAAB editorial team is committed to practicing and ensuring ethical behavior throughout editing. Below are the highlights of the journal's ethical commitment, which emerge from the "Code of Conduct and Good Practices" published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The RAAB Editorial Team has signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. Both the members of the editorial team and the authors commit to different aspects to comply with the editorial process, as detailed below:
Publishing entity
- Is committed to protecting the intellectual property of the publication and copyright.
- It will guarantee an objective, fair, and in-depth review of the texts based on peer-review evaluation.
- Undertakes to address complaints or misunderstandings of an ethical nature or conflict of interest and to follow the appropriate procedures to resolve them, according to the regulations established by the National University of La Plata.
Responsible Editors
- They undertake to continually improve the publication, to guarantee the quality of the material, to defend freedom of expression, to prevent commercial interests from compromising moral standards, and to publish errata, clarifications, or retractions when necessary.
- They will promote the opinions of authors, readers, reviewers, and board members about how to improve the editorial processes of the journal.
- They will accept or reject an article based on its relevance, originality, clarity of the text, and that it fits the thematic profile of the journal.
- They will publish guidelines about everything expected of authors and reviewers. These guidelines will be updated regularly.
- They will guarantee that the identity of the reviewers and authors is protected.
-They will drive the flow of the editorial process continuously/constantly so that the articles follow their course as quickly as possible.
- They will provide the members of the editorial team with guidelines, especially concerning the roles and activities expected of them.
- They agree to declare if there is any economic, professional, or personal conflict of interest.
Associate Editors
-They will carry out their editorial duties in an objective, fair and balanced manner.
-They will adopt the necessary measures to prevent fraudulent publications.
-They will maintain the anonymity of the authors and reviewers during the evaluation of the articles to preserve the intellectual integrity of the entire process.
-They are committed to enforcing the deadlines for reviews and publication of articles.
-They will ensure that the articles under review follow the guidelines for authors.
- They agree to declare if there is any economic, professional, or personal conflict of interest.
Assistant Editors and Layout Designers
-They are committed to meeting the deadlines for micro-editing and layout to guarantee the publication of the articles within the indicated times.
-They will guarantee fluid communication with the authors during the preparation of the galley proofs and the final version of the article.
- They agree to declare if there is any economic, professional, or personal conflict of interest.
Reviewers
- They will guarantee to carry out an honest, critical-constructive, and objective review.
- They undertake to use language consistent with the professional evaluation of an article, avoiding the use of derogatory or pejorative terms regarding the manuscript or any of its authors.
- They will evaluate the articles in the shortest time possible to respect the deadlines of the editorial process.
- They will deliver a report detailing the observations on the points of the article to be evaluated that the journal's management has requested.
- Under no circumstances will they keep the article or copy it.
- They agree to declare if there is any economic, professional, or personal conflict of interest.
Authors
- They agree not to send the article to another journal and will guarantee that the work is original and unpublished.
- They must declare if any conflict of interest exists (financial, professional, personal) during the development of the research.
- They commit to continuing with ethical guidelines consistent with the data and the discipline.
- They will be responsible for the opinions, statements, or conclusions they formulate in their articles.
- They agree to use images whose rights have been transferred or whose authors have permitted them to be published. They will mention the author of the image (be it a person, a group, or an institution, as well as the reference where it was originally published).
- If archival materials are used (letters, images, etc.), the author will mention the original data of the piece or work and the place where it is archived or exhibited.
- They undertake to make the changes or corrections requested by the reviewers.
-They undertake to notify the responsible associate editors if they decide to withdraw the work from the journal's evaluation process.
2. ANTI-PLAGGERY Policy
The RAAB maintains an anti-plagiarism policy aimed at guaranteeing that all published articles are original and have not been published before. To this end, for each manuscript received, the journal implements the following procedure:
- When submitting the article, the authors are asked to declare that the article has not been previously published or sent to other journals for evaluation and that they have followed the Guidelines for authors, in which It is established that the nominated articles must be original and have not been published in the same or another language.
- The responsible editors use the iThenticate anti-plagiarism control program in which they scan each article before assigning it to assistant editors.
If a plagiarism practice is proven, the RAAB follows the guidelines provided by COPE. The journal considers the following practices as plagiarism:
Direct plagiarism
- Minimal changes are made and a foreign text is presented as your own.
- The authorship of fragments (sentences or paragraphs) that correspond to other people's texts is omitted (whether they are reproduced verbatim and without quotation marks or if they are presented through paraphrases).
Plagiarism in direct quotes
- Quotation marks are not used to indicate the fragments (sentences or paragraphs) that are reproduced verbatim.
- Only part of the fragment (sentences or paragraphs) that is reproduced verbatim is indicated by quotation marks (it is omitted that the phrases before and/or after the passage in quotation marks also correspond to the cited text).
Plagiarism in paraphrases
- The changes made do not substantially modify the wording of the original fragment (sentences or paragraphs).
- The paraphrasing is extensive and the paraphrased passages are not differentiated from the proper passages.
- The paraphrasing is continuous and no materials, ideas, or critical reflections are added that allow interaction or enrich the information available in other already published articles.
Self-plagiarism or recycling fraud
- Minimal changes are made to one's text and it is presented as if it were a different work.
- The indication that it is a previously published work that is presented recycled with corrections or new additions is omitted.
It is not considered self-plagiarism when:
- The passages that are reproduced do not dominate the original contributions of the writer.
- The incorporation of other people's passages is used to allow the author to interact critically with another person's points of view.
- The argument of the original text retains its meaning but is reworked with different words or characteristics referring to the original quote.
- Previous articles are the basis for a new contribution and key parts must be repeated to explain and defend the new arguments.
- The author considers that what was developed in previous articles cannot be presented in a better way for the new publication.
- Repeated passages do not exceed 30% of the original work.
3. DATA AVAILABILITY Policy
RAAB promotes the transparency and reproducibility of published research so that other researchers can replicate the studies described in their articles, either to corroborate or refute the results obtained, following the provisions of National Law 26,899 of Institutional Open Access digital repositories.
To promote the reproducibility of the results, the journal requires that the authors make available and without restrictions the data sets with which they have carried out the research described in their article. To facilitate this process, the RAAB has the Supplementary Material section where authors can attach original databases. If there are limitations derived from ethical or legal causes, the authors must indicate how other researchers should access said data.
All information and research data sent to RAAB will be uploaded and made available in SEDICI, the repository of the National University of La Plata, to increase compliance with the FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (the Data must be able to be found, accessed, must be found in systems capable of interoperating and must be able to be reused in other research).
Authors are encouraged to deposit data in SEDICI, or any other research data repository (such as FigShare, Mendeley Data, Zenodo, and MorphoMuseuM, among others), before submitting contributions to the journal. In this way, when submitting the article, only the URL where the research data is located should be indicated.
Authors are requested to use formats that maximize the accessibility and reusability of the data (for example, if tabular data is used, it is suggested to use an Excel-type spreadsheet). It is recommended to publish, along with the data, the algorithms, codes, and/or analysis procedures (pipelines) that must be carried out on said data for their correct interpretation. This research data policy was adopted on January 1, 2020, and is applied to works received after that date. Articles published before said date are not subject to the described policy.
4. CONFLICT OF INTERESTS Policy
The RAAB editorial team is committed to guaranteeing the principles of transparency regarding the existence of possible conflicts of interest according to the "Code of Conduct and Good Practices" published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors, editors, and reviewers must inform the journal whether or not there are possible conflicts of interest regarding a research work. If they exist, they must be immediately declared. Authors must specify the source of funding, and clarify any ties (personal, professional, financial, or commercial) that could cause harm to the article or the institution. Editors and reviewers must specify if they have a commercial relationship with the company that funded the research, and/or if they have a personal relationship or have collaborated with the authors in the last 5 years.
5. COPYRIGHT, DIFFUSION, AND PUBLICATION RIGHTS POLICY
The authors retain the copyright and assign the right of the first publication to the journal. The RAAB has the right to reproduce, disseminate, and include the work in whole and/or part with the express mention of the authors, either to increase the visibility of the work in the academic community, as well as in bibliometric databases. The articles are registered with the Creative Commons License in the Non-Commercial Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International modality (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED), which allows third parties to use the published content as long as they mention the authorship of the work and the first publication in this journal. The authors may make other independent and additional contractual arrangements for the distribution of the article published in this journal (for example, including their PDF in an institutional repository) as long as they indicate that the work was first published in the RAAB.
6. MAJOR CORRECTIONS, ERRATA, and RETRACTIONS Policy
The RAAB Editorial Team will consider retractions, corrections, or expressions of concerns about your publications following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The purpose of this mechanism is that changes are transparent and the integrity of the academic record is always guaranteed.
Substantial corrections: Substantial changes may be requested (e.g., add or exclude co-authors, change order of co-authors) at any time during the review process with due justification and agreement of all authors. For this, a note signed by all authors and addressed to the responsible editors must be presented explaining the reasons for said change.
Errata: This notice will be published when it is necessary to correct an error or omission that may affect the record of the publication or the reputation of the authors or the journal, but where the academic integrity of the article remains intact. Said notice will accompany the original article. For this, a note signed by all authors and addressed to the responsible editors must be presented explaining the reasons for said change.
Retractions: A retraction notice will be published when a major error invalidates the conclusions of the article, or when there has been research misconduct or publication misconduct. When this occurs, the journal's responsible editors will publish a separate retraction statement, titled 'Retraction: [title of article]', which will be linked to the retracted article.
7. OPEN AND PERMANENT ACCESS Policy
The RAAB maintains its commitment to Open Access policies to scientific information by considering that both scientific publications and research financed with public funds must circulate on the Internet freely, free of charge, and without restrictions. The Argentine Journal of Biological Anthropology ratifies the Open Access model in which the contents of scientific publications are available in full text free of charge on the Internet, without temporary embargoes, and whose editorial production costs are not transferred to the authors. This policy proposes to break down the economic barriers that generate inequalities both in access to information, as well as in the generation of scientific knowledge and the publication of research results. From Volume 21 number 2 (2019), the materials published in the journal are associated with a doi (Digital Object Identifier). A DOI is a unique and permanent identifier for each of the articles, and in this case, is provided by the National University of La Plata.
8. PRESERVATION Policy
The materials published in this journal are deposited in SEDICI, the UNLP repository. Automatic backups and remote copies, format adjustments, integrity checks, and other activities required to ensure digital preservation are carried out through the repository. SEDICI's preservation policies can be consulted at the following link: http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/pages/politicas#preservacion. Once accepted, all articles receive a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which is a unique and permanent identifier for electronic publications. It provides information about the description of digital objects (magazines, articles, ...) and their location on the Internet, through metadata (author, title, publication data, etc.).
