Editorial policy

Editorial policy

Access and Reuse Policy

Copyright
As copyright holders, the authors authorize Digital Ciencia@UAQRO to reproduce, perform, edit, distribute, display, and communicate their manuscript through printed or electronic media, databases, pre- and post-publication repositories, the internet, or any other known or future medium. Additionally, authors certify that they hold the moral rights to their work and assume responsibility for any claims related to intellectual property rights, thereby releasing the Autonomous University of Querétaro from all liability.

The authors acknowledge and accept that Digital Ciencia@UAQRO uses the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY NC 4.0 International), which allows third parties to use and redistribute its contents through any medium if authorship is rightfully specified and Digital Ciencia@UAQRO is cited as the original source material.  

Finally, all authors certify that the publication of their manuscript is not-for-profit and exclusively aims to disseminate academic content; therefore, they will not receive financial compensation from Digital Ciencia@UAQRO or the Autonomous University of Querétaro.

Code of ethics

The code of ethics of Digital Ciencia@UAQRO is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Under this guideline, an expert in research ethics is appointed to review the editorial policies and their compliance periodically. Likewise, complaints or claims will be addressed and responded to through a mechanism established by the journal, which is willing to publish clarifications, corrections and retractions if necessary.

Ethics of editors

The Editorial Committee of Digital Ciencia@UAQRO is committed to upholding the ethical integrity of the review process and editorial oversight of the submitted articles, by supervising compliance with its editorial guidelines and policies, guaranteeing that the referees are qualified specialists in the selected topic; protecting the confidentiality of all parties involved; and ensuring that manuscripts are evaluated regardless of the authors’ ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, institutional affiliation, nationality or any other personal characteristic. In addition to the above, the journal is committed to maintaining its transparency by informing the interested parties about the stages of the editorial process and the status of the manuscript in question.

Ethics of authors

Authors guarantee that their article is an original and unpublished work and that it is not simultaneously under review by another journal. Similarly, they declare that all individuals involved in the research and writing of the manuscript have been included and that all citations and references used in its process have been properly added. Additionally, all authors declare themselves responsible for the content of their manuscript and affirm that the research presented has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner. Finally, they acknowledge and accept that Digital Ciencia@UAQRO operates under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, meaning that the content of their contribution may be used and distributed in any format for academic dissemination and they will not receive financial compensation from the journal or from Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro.

Ethics of referees

Referees commit to performing their duties in a critical, honest, constructive and impartial manner, maintaining confidentiality throughout the entire review process. They also commit to accepting only those manuscripts in which they are experts, trying to be transparent and clear about the limits of their area of expertise. Referees, as well as all parties involved in the editorial process, must report any indications of conflicts of interest they find and act in accordance with the principles established by COPE. In such cases, referees commit to abstaining from evaluating manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest.

In addition to the above, the following unethical behaviors must be avoided, as they may constitute a crime:

Editors, editorial assistants and editorial team

  • Fabricating or fraudulently creating an endorsement.
  • Lying about an author during the endorsement process.
  • Stealing ideas or works from a manuscript under review.

Authors

  • Presenting non-existent data.
  • Presenting fabricated documents.
  • Falsifying real data or evidence, or deliberately distorting data.
  • Using someone else’s ideas or works without proper attribution (plagiarism), including intentional copyright infringement.
  • Falsifying authorship by omitting the name of an author or including someone who did not contribute to the work.
  • Falsifying the status of the publication.

Referees

  • Falsifying facts or issuing fraudulent endorsements.
  • Delaying the submission of an endorsement without reasonable grounds to gain personal advantages.
  • Stealing ideas or advances from an article under review.

AI policy

Artificial intelligence (AI) usage poses a challenge to ethical academic editorial management. In its commitment to academic integrity, transparency, responsibility, and good editorial practices, Digital Ciencia@UAQRO sets out the following AI usage criteria for all actors involved in the editorial management. These guidelines are effective as of July 2026.

AI is defined here as “a computer’s or computer-controlled robot’s ability to execute tasks typically associated to intelligent beings.” In turn, generative AI is understood as that which “executes tasks typically associated to intelligent beings through generative modeling and deep learning in order to produce or generate content from existing media (graphics, text, audio, video), statistical modeling, and language based on probabilities and algorithms” (OECD, 2023; OMPI, 2020; Zielinski et al., 2023, as cited in Penabad et al., 2024, pp. 8-9). AI tools cannot be awarded authorship due to their lack of moral, legal, or ethical accountability (Penabad-Camacho et al., 2024). Therefore, AI usage acceptance in the journal is strictly limited to copyediting tasks, which excludes text generation, data analysis, and any other type of automatically generated content.

AI guidelines for authors

Accepted AI usage in submitted works is limited to copyediting tasks under close author supervision. Authors must not use AI to analyze data, write, or create content.

Upon submission, authors must disclose any AI usage. They must also acknowledge that they comprehend and agree to adhere to this policy. Failure to comply will result in the rejection of the submitted work, as well as a three-year ban from further submissions.

Authors must disclose any AI usage on a note at the end of the body text, specifying the tool’s name, version and model, dates, prompts, and URL, as follows:

AI disclosure

In the course of this work, on July 1, 2026, authors used Claude 3.5 Sonnet (large language model) for text editing with the prompt: “Edit the text to fix repetitions, punctation and spelling mistakes,” and the following URL: https://claude.ai/chat/

AI guidelines for reviewers

AI usage must be avoided in the review process. Reviewers must personally read and validate works to guarantee an ethical and proper verdict.

During the process, reviewers may use software to detect similarities or AI generated content, provided texts are not incorporated to databases, or fed to AI training tools.

AI guidelines in editorial processes

Digital Ciencia@UAQRO guarantees that editorial managers, Editorial Board, and International Scientific Board members will conduct AI-free editorial processes, and are competent and capable of ethical decision-making to uphold academic integrity. Likewise, they have an obligation to continue learning and stay updated in the face of the innovative and changing nature of AI tools (Penabad-Camacho et al., 2024). Finally, in adherence to transparency, editors will ensure AI usage is properly disclosed by authors.

Digital preservation policy

Digital Ciencia@UAQRO guarantees access, integrity and long-term preservation of the articles, issues and metadata published in the journal through a number of strategies. The editorial team, alongside the Coordination of Periodicals and the Department of Communications Technology and Innovation (DITI) of the Autonomous University of Queretaro, will implement, supervise, and update this policy in an effort to address the journal’s technological and editorial needs.

To achieve this goal, the following actions are implemented:

  • The editorial team updates the data backup stored in the journal’s official cloud storage by the end of each semester’s first month.
  • In order to ensure preservation and tracking of the journal’s metadata, each article and issue published is assigned a CrossRef validated DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
  • The journal’s contents are stored in the university’s institutional repository. Concurrently, DITI takes the following measures:
  • Periodical updates of the website’s data backups.
  • Constant monitoring of the technological environment to anticipate safety issues.
  • Software updates.
  • Digital Ciencia@UAQRO’s editorial management is carried out in the Open Journal System (OJS) platform; and the metadata, as well as all versions of the articles and full issues published in the journal’s website, are stored in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program.

References

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2024). Recommendation of the Council on Artificial Intelligence, OECD/LEGAL/0449. https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0449

Organización Mundial de la Propiedad Intelectual (OMPI). (2020). Diálogo de la OMPI sobre propiedad intelectual (PI) e inteligencia artificial (IA): segunda sesión. https://www.wipo.int/meetings/es/details.jsp?meeting_id=55309

Penabad-Camacho, L., Morera-Castro, M., & Penabad-Camacho, M.A. (2024). Guide for the use and reporting of artificial intelligence in scientific-academic journals. Revista Electrónica Educare, 28(S), 1-41. https://doi.org/10.15359/ree.28-S.19830

Zielinski, C., Winker, M.A., Aggarwal, R., Ferris, L.E., Heinemann, M., Lapeña, J.F., Pai, S.A., Ing, E., Citrome, L., Alam, M., Voight, M., & Habibzadeh, F. (31 may 2023). Chatbots, generative AI, and scholarly manuscripts. WAME recommendations on chatbots and generative artificial intelligence in relation to scholarly publications. WAME. https://www.wame.org/page2.php?id=106