Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

We are committed to editorial independence and strive to ensure that this principle is not compromised by competing interests, fear or any other corporate, business, financial or political influence. Our editorial processes reflect this commitment.

We do not discriminate against authors, editors, or reviewers on the basis of personal characteristics or identity. We are committed to promoting diversity, removing barriers to inclusion, and fostering equity at every stage of our publishing process. We actively seek and encourage submissions from scholars of diverse backgrounds, including race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and disability.

We do not tolerate abusive behavior or correspondence towards our staff and other individuals involved in the publication process on our behalf. If anyone involved in this process engages in such behavior, we have the right to take action to protect others from such abuse. This may include withdrawing a manuscript from consideration or challenging clearly abusive comments in the peer review process.

1. Duties and responsibilities of Editors

1.1. General

• Strive to meet the needs of their readers and authors.
• Improve continuously
• Ensure the quality of the material published.
• Defend freedom of expression
• Protect the integrity and confidentiality of academic information.
• Be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies whenever necessary.

1.2. Specific regarding the readers

Whether by direct mention or specific request, editors will always provide information about the origin of the publication, sources of funding, the role of potential funders or sponsors, and the financial sponsorship of published articles. In addition, they will make publicly available information about editorial policies, editorial criteria, and indexing efforts.

1.3. In relation to the authors:

The editors will take all necessary steps to ensure the quality of the material they publish, specifying, as appropriate, the purposes and standards of the requirements for the various sections into which the content is organized.

The Editor will inform authors, through the website, of the requirements for preparing manuscripts, the process for evaluating original submissions, guidelines for revisions, response deadlines, appeal mechanisms, copyright handling, and resolution of conflicts of interest.

Any changes in personnel and editorial criteria will not affect authors (or their work) accepted for publication on dates prior to the implementation of the changes.

The Editor's decision to accept or reject a manuscript for publication will be based solely on the significance, originality, and clarity of the manuscript, as well as the relevance of the study to the stated content of.

The Editor is responsible for deciding which manuscripts to publish. They will be guided by the following guidelines:

1. To consider the potential publication of submitted manuscripts solely on the basis of their scholarly quality and adherence to editorial standards, without regard to the author's race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnicity, citizenship, institutional affiliation, or political philosophy.
2. Requiring the author to make changes necessary to bring the manuscript into compliance with editorial standards, except for minor changes that the Editor may review and implement himself.
3. To send accepted manuscripts for external review, ensuring anonymity and confidentiality of the content to third parties throughout the process.
4. To avoid or punish any form of academic fraud or practices not accepted by this Declaration. Such measures, which may be requested by third parties, may range from a verbal warning to the permanent suspension of an author, with the possibility of rejecting the publication of the manuscript. Depending on the seriousness of the matter, the Editor may seek advice from members of the Editorial Board.
5. To make the necessary clarifications, corrections, amendments or retractions of articles in order to resolve any problems discovered after the publication of an issue of the Journal. These will be published on the website. Authors who need to retract their work can request the form by contacting 's email.
6. To maintain constant communication with authors and external reviewers, clarifying any doubts that may arise during the process of review, evaluation and publication.
7. To protect the integrity and confidentiality of the academic information of all those involved in the process.

Peer review is essential to maintaining the standards of our publications. The arbitration process is designed to assist the Editor in making decisions and to help authors improve the quality of their manuscripts.

1. Editor's Commitments

1. Make the guidelines or criteria for evaluating manuscripts readily available so that authors are aware of the points that reviewers will consider in their work.
2. The Journal will take measures to protect and safeguard the identity of reviewers and authors prior to their evaluation. Any changes in this regard will be promptly communicated to authors.
3. We encourage our peer reviewers to familiarize themselves with and act in accordance with relevant best practice guidelines for peer review. Journal editors and reviewers should refer to the COPE Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.
4. Be vigilant for signs of fraudulent or manipulated peer review and raise any concerns by emailing journals@uft.cl.
5. Assist our editors and peer reviewers in investigating and taking action in cases of suspected manipulated or fraudulent peer review.
6. To protect the confidentiality of participants in the peer review process where anonymity is part of the publication's peer review process. We also expect our publishing partners, authors, and peer reviewers to abide by any relevant confidentiality agreements and to provide us with the necessary information to do so.

2. Duties and Responsibilities of External Reviewers

1. Accept only those texts for which they have sufficient competence, experience, and knowledge to perform their analysis.
2. Always inform the Editor of potential conflicts of interest.
3. Decline to review a manuscript if they do not have the competence, experience, or knowledge to conduct the evaluation or if they have a conflict of interest.
4. Provide an objective analysis of the manuscripts under review based on the guidelines provided by the Editors, expressing their comments or relevant observations about the manuscript (not the author(s)) in a clear and respectful manner, and providing their reasoning.
5. Keep confidential the information and ideas obtained by the privilege of refereeing the manuscript, without using them for personal gain. Neither should you show or discuss the manuscript with other individuals, with the exception of those designated by the Editor.
6. Identify relevant works on the topic that have not been cited by the authors, with the understanding that any statement that has been previously reported in another work must be accompanied by the corresponding citation. The reviewer should also inform the Editor if the manuscript bears substantial similarities to other known works or any other anomalous aspects.
7. Provide feedback and verdict on the manuscript within the timeframe and in the format specified by the Editor.

The editors will have a transparent mechanism for receiving and handling complaints and appeals, including response and appeal procedures at various levels, leading to a final, non-appealable decision by the Editors and authors, which will be manifested in the appointment of an impartial arbitrator designated on a case-by-case basis by the parties involved.

1. Autorship Criteria

The Journal considers as an author someone who has actively participated in the research and contributed to the writing of the submitted manuscript. The first author is considered to be the individual who has made the most significant contribution to the manuscript.

1. We acknowledge that different disciplines and publication formats have different norms for who is listed as an author. Where no other guidance is specified, we recommend applying the following principles (ICMJE):
2. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; and/or
3. Drafting the work or critically revising it for important intellectual content; and/or
4. Final approval of the version to be published; and
5. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work and ensure that issues related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are properly investigated and resolved.

Those who have made significant contributions to the research but are not listed as authors or responsible for the final version of the work such as facilitating data, correcting the academic style of the article, etc. may be listed in the Acknowledgments section of the article. If requested by the authors of the article, the published version will briefly describe the individual contributions of each member of the signing group to the collective work.

The corresponding author must ensure that no responsible authors are omitted from the work, while at the same time each of them must meet the aforementioned co-authorship criteria to avoid fictitious or gift authorship, which constitutes bad scientific practice. For this purpose, the final authorship of the work will be established from the moment it is submitted for evaluation and cannot be changed later without a detailed and reasonable explanation justifying the addition or removal of an author, an explanation that's editorial board may or may not accept.

We support our editors in resolving authorship disputes. We adhere to established and emerging industry standards to increase transparency in authorship (e.g., ORCID). We support initiatives that provide transparency in authorship and contributions, such as the CRediT taxonomy.

2. Duties and responsibilities of the author

The specific responsibilities of the authors include:

1. Correcting and proofreading the manuscript. Handling revisions and resubmissions of peer-reviewed manuscripts until acceptance.
2. Accept the Editorial and intellectual property guidelines of the Journal.
3. Acting on behalf of all co-authors in responding to post-publication inquiries from any source, including questions relating to publishing ethics, reuse of content, or availability of data, materials, resources, etc.
4. Ensure smooth communication with the Editorial team. Eventually, ensure that all co-authors have reviewed the final version of the manuscript and agree to its publication.
5. Immediately notify the Editor if you discover a significant error in one's work and cooperate with the Editor to rectify the error in the manuscript or published article.

All article affiliations should represent the institution(s) where the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

We strive to ensure that all publications in the Journal are free from undue influence. Conflicts of interest are situations that could be perceived as an undue influence on the presentation, review, or publication of a paper. These conflicts may be of a financial, non-financial, professional, contractual, or personal nature. We also expect anyone who suspects the existence of undisclosed conflicts of interest related to a paper published or under review by the Journal to report it to the appropriate editor or send an email to journals@uft.cl.

It is required that the submission include a funding statement in addition to a conflict-of-interest statement.

If an undisclosed conflict of interest is identified during the review process, the author(s) will be contacted for clarification. If the explanation is not satisfactory, the manuscript will be withdrawn from the review process.

If there is a conflict of interest in previously published research, the manuscript will be withdrawn from, with an announcement explaining the reasons for the decision. In addition, a letter will be sent to the association or institution hosting the author(s) in question to inform them of the matter. Please see section XV.

The text of the paper must acknowledge all publications that have influenced the research, and therefore the original sources on which the information in the paper is based should be identified and cited in the bibliography. However, irrelevant citations or references to similar examples should not be included, and excessive mention of well-established research in the scientific corpus should be avoided.

The author should not use information obtained privately through conversation, correspondence, or discussion with colleagues in the field, unless the author has explicit written permission from the source of the information and the information was received in the context of scientific advice.

Plagiarism in all its forms (including self-plagiarism), multiple or redundant publication, and simultaneous submission to more than one journal are serious breaches of the ethics and integrity of scientific research and publication.

1. Originality

Authors must ensure that the data or results presented in the paper are original and authentic. However, it is permissible to publish a paper that expands on another paper that has appeared as a brief note, communication, or abstract in conference proceedings, conference papers, or working papers, provided that the original text is appropriately cited and the changes represent a substantial alteration of what has already been published.

Secondary publications are also acceptable if they are intended for completely different audiences; for example, if the article is published in different languages, or if there is one version for specialists and another for the general public. These circumstances should be specified, and the original publication should be cited appropriately.

2. Plagiarism

We define plagiarism as the use of ''ideas, data, and other materials produced by another person without attribution to the author(s).

Plagiarism can be produced regarding any type of source, including:

• Text, illustrations, musical quotations, extended mathematical derivations, computer code, etc;
• Material downloaded from websites or extracted from manuscripts or other sources.
• Published and unpublished material, including conferences, presentations, and gray literature.

We do not tolerate plagiarism in any of our publications, and we reserve the right to check all submissions with appropriate plagiarism detection tools.

This means that paper titles, author names, and content will be subject to review and checked with the specific tool, Similarity Check, provided by CrossRef.

If plagiarism is detected after publication, we will follow the policies described in the XIII "Retractions, Corrections, and Expressions of Concern" section of this statement. We expect our readers, reviewers, and editors to raise suspicions of plagiarism by contacting the appropriate Editor or by sending an email to journals@uft.cl.

3. Duplicate, Redundant, and Self-Plagiarism Publication

Duplicate or redundant publication, or "self-plagiarism" (COPE), occurs when a work or substantial parts of a work are published more than once by the same author or authors without proper cross-referencing or justification for the overlap. It may be in the same language or in a different language.

We do not support substantial overlap between publications unless it is deemed to strengthen the scholarly discourse from an editorial perspective, and there is clear approval from the original publication, along with proper citation of the original source.

We expect our readers, reviewers, and editors to raise any suspicions of duplicate or redundant publication by contacting the appropriate editor or by sending an email to journals@uft.cl.

When authors submit manuscripts to our journal, they should not be under consideration, accepted for publication, or in press in any other journal, book, or similar entity, unless a journal explicitly states that it does not have an exclusive submission policy. However, depositing a preprint on the author's personal website, an institutional repository, or a preprint server is not considered a prior or duplicate publication.

Authors must adhere to our Deposit Policy regarding preprint files and the maintenance of the registered version.

Any manuscript based on a dissertation must be a revision of the dissertation material and must be written in accordance with the style guide or relevant bibliographic guidelines. When citing the thesis or reusing figures, authors must avoid self-plagiarism by properly citing and referencing any copied or adapted portions of the thesis. If the thesis has been published by a publisher and is publicly available, permission from the thesis publisher may be required before submission to a journal. The cover letter should inform the appropriate editor that the manuscript is based on a thesis.

4. Plagiarism Control

If similarities are found using the above anti-plagiarism tool, the editors will contact the author(s) to resolve the citation issues. If these corrections do not reduce the similarity index, submissions suspected of total or partial plagiarism will undergo the following steps

1. Assessment of the suspicion or misconduct by 's management.
2. Communication of the suspicion or proven fact of fraud (with dates and evidence) to the author(s).
3. Set a deadline for responses and/or clarifications. Except in cases of force majeure, the deadline is mandatory and will not exceed 30 calendar days from the date of communication to the parties concerned.
4. Considering, where applicable, clarifications and evidence provided by the questioned author(s).

Resolution and final verdict, by 's management, regarding the fate of the work in question within a period not exceeding 60 days. The verdict is final and cannot be appealed.

The entire process will be in writing and properly documented in 's management records. If necessary, the publication's management may seek the advice or opinion of experts outside the Editorial team to have additional elements for a better resolution.

The penalty for authors who have committed plagiarism or self-plagiarism will be the inability to submit new texts and communications for a period of three years. reserves the right, depending on the nature and effects of the plagiarism addressed, to communicate the results publicly or pass the information to other administrative and jurisdictional bodies relevant to the matter.

For the purpose of defining concepts and assessing the possible detection of this misconduct, this journal will adhere to what is stipulated by COPE.

Editors will ensure that the content to be published meets internationally accepted ethical criteria. If necessary, they will request relevant ethical credentials from authors, such as ethics committees, review boards, etc. The Editorial Board reserves the right to make the final decision regarding the acceptance, quality, or relevance of evidence.

The editors will promote ethical safeguards in both published and unpublished work. To achieve this, efforts will be made to address concerns with authors or those directly involved. If necessary, due to the magnitude or impact of the ethical misconduct, cases may be referred to other individuals and institutions.

When we become aware of fraudulent research or research misconduct by an author of the Journal, our primary concern is the integrity of the content we have published. Any publication that contains fraudulent results will be retracted, or an appropriate correction or statement of concern will be issued. For more information, see the XIII "Retractions (...)" section of this statement.

If significant inaccuracies, misleading or deceptive statements, or distorted information are found in, this journal will contact the authors for immediate correction in the online version of. This procedure will be clearly explained in the same publication. If, for any reason, the correction is not achieved, the Editors reserve the right to remove the content in question.

1. Manipulation, Falsification, and Fabrication of Images

When research data are collected or presented in the form of images, altering them can sometimes distort the results obtained or their meaning. We recognize that there may be legitimate reasons to modify images, but we expect authors to avoid doing so when it leads to falsification, fabrication, or misrepresentation of their results.

Research involving human subjects must be approved by the appropriate ethics committees and adhere to international ethical and legal standards for research. We also expect authors to respect the privacy rights of participants and to obtain the necessary consent for publication before submitting their work to us.

In these cases, researchers must make an explicit statement in the Methodology section that they have obtained informed consent from participants. The consent form should be included as an attachment to the submission.

We support transparency and openness about data, code, and other materials associated with research. We expect authors to maintain accurate records of the supporting evidence necessary to enable others to understand, verify, and replicate new findings, and to provide or grant access to this supporting evidence upon reasonable request. Where appropriate, and where permitted by their employer, funding body, or others who may have an interest, we encourage authors to

• deposit the evidence in an appropriate repository or storage location for sharing and reuse by others; and
• describe where the evidence can be found in a data availability statement that authors should include in their publication.

Many of our publications also allow authors to submit and publish supplementary material that is not essential for inclusion or that cannot be accommodated in the main text, but that would be of value to the reader. Unless otherwise stated, it should be assumed that data, code, and other materials or supplementary files will not be peer-reviewed.

The Journal is interested in providing authors with the opportunity to link supporting evidence to their manuscripts, either through our own platform or through third-party services

XI. Freedom of Expression and the Encouragement of Debate

Freedom of expression is fundamental to us as academic editors, but we do not support the publication of false statements that damage the reputation of individuals, groups, or organizations.

The editors will publish well-founded criticism or objections received regarding the publication of an article or opinion. The authors of the criticized materials will be given the opportunity to respond, adhering to norms of respect and cordial communication.

The opinions expressed in the Journal are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Universidad Finis Terrae.

We maintain a record of the existence of everything we publish, with information (metadata) describing each publication. If it is determined that our content does not comply with the laws of a sovereign nation, we make every effort to ensure that the metadata remains accessible within that jurisdiction. If we are forced to alter the publication record in any way, such as in the case of research misconduct leading to retraction of a publication, we will preserve the scholarly record to the extent possible. Please see the section on XIII "Retractions (...)" of this statement for information on how we do this.

Journal editors will consider retractions, corrections, or expressions of concern according to the COPE Retraction Guidelines. If an author is found to have made an error, a corrigendum will be published. If it is determined that an error has been made, an erratum will be published. In general, retractions are reserved for articles with serious flaws that undermine confidence in the results or conclusions, or that contain substantial plagiarism or life-threatening content. Journals that publish accepted manuscripts may make minor changes, such as those likely to occur during copyediting, typesetting, or proofreading, but any substantial correction will be made according to the COPE guidelines.

In exceptional cases, we may remove an article from online publication if we deem it necessary to comply with our legal obligations. This includes, but is not limited to, situations where we are concerned that the article is defamatory, violates privacy or confidentiality laws, is the subject of a court order, or may pose a danger to the general public. Under these circumstances, we may decide to take down the article and post a notice clearly stating the reasons for taking down the entire article.

In the event of retraction, we will do so in a manner that preserves the integrity of the scholarly record and other related works (e.g., other volumes in a series). This includes preserving the associated metadata and, where legally permissible, the abstract.

We work with third parties, including commercial services, to provide our users with metrics that illustrate the impact and reception of our content. We support the work of third parties such as Altmetric, PlumX, and Crossref, and in some cases actively facilitate their work (by providing data, access, or fees). We do not intend to control or influence these third parties and are not responsible for the metrics and ratings they produce.

The Journal is also a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We are committed to promoting best practices in assessing and reporting the impact of academic research.

Regarding and its editorial environment (authors, reviewers, readers), the receipt of complaints, claims, appeals, rebuttals, and responses to the Editor will be considered. The Editor will determine the steps to be taken and the persons and bodies to be involved.

To file a complaint, one must write directly to the Editor, whose contact information can be found in the Contact Us section. A dialog will be established between the author and the Scientific Committee to clarify the situation.

Once the information is received, each case is evaluated on its own merits and a decision is made that is not subject to appeal.

The maximum timeframe for a final response is one month from the date of the initial complaint.

If the complaint is against the Editor, the communication should be directed to the Editor in the first instance. If the complaint is not addressed or resolved satisfactorily, the complainant may submit it to the Management, which may, if necessary, jointly agree with the complainant to appoint a final arbitrator to render a decision binding on the parties.