Editorial Best Practices

The journal is published biannually, appearing in July and January, and is addressed to the scientific community of legal researchers. Its target audience also includes researchers in the Social Sciences, given the interdisciplinary nature of the research conducted.

1. Objectives

  • To publish scientific output within the fields of humanities and the arts, resulting from research conducted at the national level, while also incorporating international collaboration.
  • To strengthen the presence and social value of the human sciences through the construction of knowledge supported by scientifically validated tools.
  • To contribute to the consolidation of a scientific community of humanists, both nationally and internationally.
  • To encourage research in the field of the humanities, thereby promoting reflection on crucial aspects of our daily, social, and political lives.
  • To foster multidisciplinary research within the scope of the humanities.
  • To disseminate an open-access academic journal and comply with the standards and quality requirements of international indexing services.
  • To promote best practices in research and academic ethics.
  • To prioritize spaces for reflection inherent to literary studies, linguistics, the arts, and the humanities in general.

2. Editorial Team

At Nullius, we work with a team committed to ensuring academic quality and transparency throughout the entire editorial process.

  • Manuscript management: The Director, the Editor-in-Chief, and the Associate Editors oversee each submission, ensuring compliance with formal requirements and the adoption of best publishing practices.
  • Academic review: The Editorial Board assesses the thematic relevance of manuscripts, while the Editorial and Referees Committees —composed of distinguished national and international scholars— ensure the scientific rigor and methodological soundness of each work.
  • Editorial decision: The Editor makes the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection, always based on the peer review process.

For the sake of transparency, Nullius communicates the estimated timelines of the editorial process:

  • Initial assessment: up to 1 month
  • Peer review: up to 3 months
  • Final decision: up to 2 months

In addition, we publish the authors’ affiliation details (institution, city, country, and email address), strengthening both academic visibility and reliability.

3. Peer Review Process

The academic peer review process involves the evaluation of manuscripts and validation of research by engaging experts or external reviewers who are unaffiliated with the publishing institution.

Peer review ensures rigorous evaluation of manuscripts, applying criteria such as quality, credibility, relevance, and feasibility of the research intended for publication.

The journal is transitioning toward open science. It adopts a double-blind review process when manuscripts do not have preprints deposited, and a single-blind review process when preprints are available.

Principles for Review

  • Manuscript evaluation: manuscripts are reviewed by two subject-matter experts.
  • Impartiality: all individuals involved in the review process must respect the authors' intellectual freedom and values. Studies with negative results must not be excluded.
  • Honesty: participants in the evaluation process must demonstrate transparency and objectivity in their reviews.
  • Confidentiality: all information regarding the content of manuscripts and author identities must be kept confidential.
  • Acceptance or rejection of manuscripts must be based on quality standards, alignment with the journal’s research lines or objectives, originality, and the absence of scientific misconduct.
  • Retraction of published articles: this may occur due to unreliable results, errors, omission of sources, or scientific misconduct (e.g., data manipulation, plagiarism, duplicate publication). A retraction notice will be published, although the article will remain accessible in the journal.
  • Conflict of interest: individuals with academic, professional, or personal ties to the manuscript’s author must recuse themselves from the evaluation process.
  • Originality: manuscripts must undergo authenticity checks using appropriate software tools.

4. Authorship Standards

Authors must ensure that the data and results presented are original and have not been copied, fabricated, distorted, or manipulated. Plagiarism in all its forms, duplicate or redundant publication, and data fabrication or manipulation constitute serious ethical violations and are considered scientific misconduct. Authors submitting manuscripts must commit not to submit the same work to another journal while it is under review.

The journal requires authors to adhere to the ethical standards expected of researchers and scientific writers. Specifically, all authors must comply with the ethical guidelines established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

5. References

The manuscript must acknowledge all referenced publications through proper citations and should rely on original and relevant sources only.

If the author does not cite the sources directly but considers that the consulted documents contributed to the manuscript, the uncited references should be included as footnotes.

The journal does not limit the number of references included in manuscripts; however, it discourages excessive and unjustified self-citation unless it is clearly relevant and justified for the research.