Policies

Editorial and Ethics Policies

Informática y Sistemas follows the COPE Core Practices and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

1. Peer review

All manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review:

  1. Editorial screening: the editors check scope, compliance with the template, and basic scientific quality.
  2. Similarity check: manuscripts are analyzed with Compilatio. Manuscripts with a similarity index above 10% (excluding quotations and references) are returned or rejected.
  3. External review: at least two external reviewers, with no conflict of interest, evaluate originality, relevance, methodological rigor, clarity, and contribution. A third reviewer is consulted if their opinions disagree.
  4. Revisions: up to two review rounds. Authors have 15 calendar days to submit each revised version, together with the response-to-reviewers form.
  5. Decision: the Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision based on the reviews. Possible decisions are: accept, minor revisions, major revisions, or reject.

Average time to first decision: 60 days. Average time from acceptance to online publication: 30 days.

2. Authorship

All listed authors must have made a substantial contribution to the work and approved the final version. Contributions are declared using the CRediT taxonomy. Honorary or ghost authorship is not accepted. Changes to the author list after submission require the written consent of all authors. All authors must provide an ORCID iD.

3. Use of generative artificial intelligence

Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors. Authors who use these tools for writing, data analysis, code, or images must disclose the tool, version, and purpose in the Materials and Methods section or in the Acknowledgments. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy and originality of the content. Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts under review to generative AI tools.

4. Data and code availability

Authors are encouraged to deposit the data and code that support their results in an open repository (for example, Zenodo, GitHub, or Figshare) and to cite them in the article. When data cannot be shared, the article must explain why.

5. Conflicts of interest

Authors, reviewers, and editors must declare any financial, institutional, or personal relationship that could influence their work. Manuscripts authored by members of the Editorial Committee are handled by another editor, and their authors have no access to the review process.

6. Research ethics

Studies involving human participants, personal data, or animals must have approval from an ethics committee and informed consent, stated in the manuscript, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

7. Originality, preprints, and self-archiving

Submitted manuscripts must be original and must not be under review elsewhere. Preprints posted on recognized servers (for example, arXiv or SSRN) are accepted and must be declared at submission. After publication, authors may deposit the published version in institutional or subject repositories, citing the DOI.

8. Corrections, retractions, and complaints

Errors detected after publication are handled through a correction notice. Articles with serious misconduct (plagiarism, data fabrication, or duplicate publication) are retracted following the COPE guidelines; the retraction notice remains linked to the original article. Complaints and appeals must be sent to revista.iys@utm.edu.ec and are answered within 30 days.

9. Citation practices

Editors and reviewers must not ask authors to cite articles from this journal or from their own work unless it is scientifically justified.

Authors retain the copyright of their work and grant the journal the right of first publication. Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Authors may deposit the published version in institutional or subject repositories, citing the original publication and its DOI.

The journal is free of charge for readers and authors. There are no submission, processing, or publication fees (no APCs). The journal is fully funded by the Universidad Técnica de Manabí.