Policies
Open Source Policy
Digital Preservation Policies
Policies on Authorship and Contribution
Policies on Complaints and Appeals
Policies on Research Conduct
Policies on Conflicts of Interest
Policies on Data Sharing and Reproducibility
Policies on Ethical Oversight
Intellectual Property Policy
Policies on the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Policies on Corrections and Retractions
Policies on Post-Publication Discussions
Open Access Policy
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología provides immediate open access to its content based on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports greater global knowledge exchange. The journal does not impose embargo periods or post-publication access restrictions.
Publication License
All articles published in the journal are licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” (CC BY NC SA 4.0) license, to the extent that this is possible without infringing the rights of third parties. Sharing—copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format—is permitted under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must provide appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes have been made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in a way that suggests that you or your use are endorsed by the licensor.
- NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contribution under the same license as the original.
For more information, see the full legal text of the license at:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Self-archiving conditions: Authors are permitted to reuse published works; that is, they may archive the post-print (or the final version following peer review, or the publisher’s PDF version) for non-commercial purposes, including deposit in institutional or subject-specific repositories or on personal websites.
Digital Preservation Policies
This journal uses the LOCKSS and systems for the storage, preservation, and restoration of documents, as well as for their display via the OJS open-access platform.
More information::
https://pkp.sfu.ca/pkp-pn/
https://pkp.sfu.ca/2016/08/08/pkp-lockss-pln-update/
https://pkp.sfu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/PKPPrivateLOCKSSNetworkOverview.pdf
Policies on Authorship and Contribution
In accordance with best editorial practices for scientific journals, an author of a publication is defined as a person who has made a significant intellectual contribution to the research work. The order of authors should reflect their degree of responsibility in the research.
Authorship Requirements:
- Corresponding Author: Each article must designate an author responsible for managing communication with the journal Ciencia y Tecnología during the editorial process, as well as for ensuring that the team has reviewed and approved the final content.
- Transparency in Contributions: Ciencia y Tecnología promotes ethical, fair, and transparent authorship attribution, in line with editorial quality standards. Therefore, it requires that all authors detail their specific contribution to the work.
- Practices Excluded from Authorship: The journal rejects honorary authorship (gift authorship) and ghost authorship. All listed authors must meet the stated contribution criteria.
CRediT Taxonomy for Specifying Contributions
To standardize this information, we recommend using the following authorship template from the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) taxonomy, which defines 14 roles in scientific production, as detailed below:
- Design and Planning
- Conceptualization: Development of ideas; formulation or refinement of general research goals and objectives.
- Methodology: Development or design of the methodology.
- Funding Acquisition: Securing financial support for the project that led to this publication.
- Execution and Data Collection
- Management and Technical Support
- Project Administration: Management and coordination of the planning and execution of research activities.
- Supervision: Oversight and management of the planning and execution of research activities, including external guidance to the core team.
- Software: Programming, software development; computer program design; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
- Data Processing and Validation
- Formal Analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize the study data.
- Data curation: Management activities involving annotation (production metadata), data cleaning, and maintenance of research data (including software code, when necessary to interpret the data itself) for initial use and subsequent reuse.
- Validation: Verification—either as part of the activity or separately—of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research findings.
- Communication and Dissemination
- Original Draft Writing: Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
- Writing—review and editing: Preparation, creation, and/or submission of the published work by members of the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary, or revision.
- Visualization: Preparation, creation, and/or submission of the published work, specifically data visualization/presentation. Data Processing and Validation
Changes to Authorship
Once the manuscript is received, the list of authors is considered final. No changes (additions, deletions, or changes to the order of authors) will be accepted at any stage of the editorial process after receipt.
Policies on Complaints and Appeals
Procedures
- Submission of Requests: All complaints and appeals must be submitted in writing to the editor via email at cienciaytecnologia@uteq.edu.ec.
- Handling Process
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- The editor will:
- Receive and process the request,
- Ensure the confidentiality of the process,
- Respond as quickly as possible.
- For complex cases that require it, the editor will consult the Editorial Committee to resolve the dispute.
- The editor will:
- Response Times: All requests will be addressed and acknowledged within a maximum of 5 business days. The final decision will be issued within a maximum of 30 calendar days, extendable by an additional 15 days with express justification when the complexity of the case warrants it.
Policies on Research Conduct
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología is committed to ensuring academic integrity and will address any allegations of research or publication misconduct in accordance with COPE guidelines COPE.
Procedures
- Receipt and Evaluation
- The Editorial Team will identify the documents in question and process the complaint.
- The authors involved will be contacted to request their response to the allegations.
- Investigation:
- In complex cases, the editor may:
- Consult COPE or institutions associated with the authors (ethics committees, universities).
- Share relevant information with third parties, while maintaining the necessary confidentiality.
- In complex cases, the editor may:
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- A distinction will be made between unintentional errors and deliberate misconduct (falsification and fabrication of data or plagiarism).
- Resolution: Depending on the severity, the following measures will be applied:
- Correction: If minor errors are verified.
- Editorial note: When the evidence is inconclusive.
- Retraction: For substantiated cases that undermine the scientific validity of the article (see Retraction Policy).
- Rejection: If misconduct is detected in unpublished manuscripts.
Types of Misconduct
- Data falsification/fabrication: Manipulation or invention of results, including alteration of images or omission of data.
- Ethical violations: Research conducted outside approved ethical frameworks.
- Duplicate publication: Authors may not submit a manuscript to more than one journal simultaneously. If the editorial team becomes aware of such a situation, the manuscript will be rejected. Translations of previously published manuscripts must not be published as original articles.
Additional Actions:
- The authors’ institutions will be notified.
- Authors must provide the original data if the integrity of the results is questioned.
Conflict of Interest Policies
All parties involved in the editorial process (authors, editors, and reviewers) must disclose any conflict of interest—personal, commercial, political, academic, or financial—that could influence the evaluation or publication of a manuscript. Authors must disclose all sources of research funding. The existence of funding does not imply a conflict of interest, but failure to disclose it does constitute an ethical violation.
Disclosure Procedures and Consequences:
- Disclosure must be made at the time of submission using the designated field in OJS.
- Failure to disclose constitutes an ethical violation.
- If an undisclosed conflict is discovered after publication, a correction or retraction will be issued depending on the severity of the case.
Authors must report such conflicts to the editor, while reviewers must recuse themselves from participating if such a conflict exists. The journal Ciencia y Tecnología ensures the selection of reviewers who are thematically compatible and academically objective. In the event of disputes or allegations of misconduct, the journal will act in accordance with COPE guidelines, taking measures such as corrections, clarifications, or retractions when appropriate, thereby ensuring the integrity of the editorial process. The editorial board actively promotes transparency and requires the reporting of any anomalies detected during the process. Under no circumstances will misconduct be tolerated, and we are committed to preventing the publication of articles with proven irregularities.
Policies on Data Sharing and Reproducibility
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología operates under an open-access model to promote the dissemination of knowledge. We encourage authors to share their research data, while safeguarding the confidentiality of participants; such data may be requested during the peer review process. Data must be deposited in open-access repositories (Zenodo, Figshare, or others) prior to or concurrently with the publication of the article. For third-party data, the terms of access must be specified.
We promote the following best practices:
- Authentic data that is relevant to the study and properly cited.
- Bidirectional linking between articles and datasets.
- Full ownership of rights for publication.
We consider the following to be serious ethical violations:
- Reuse of data without contributing new findings.
- Plagiarism or unauthorized use of materials.
- Manipulation or misrepresentation of information.
In cases of proven misconduct, we will apply sanctions that may include retractions, in accordance with COPE protocols. This policy aims to ensure the transparency, reproducibility, and scientific integrity of our publications.
Policies on Ethical Oversight
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología is committed to ethical scientific publishing, based on the COPE guidelines. Our goal is to ensure transparency, originality, and legality in all published works; we categorically reject practices such as plagiarism, data manipulation or falsification, citation manipulation, copyright infringement, duplicate publication, and any other form of academic misconduct.
The editorial team will continuously monitor all editorial processes to ensure that high ethical standards are met. Confidentiality is ensured in the peer review process, the use of anti-plagiarism tools, and impartiality in the selection of manuscripts. If irregularities are detected, authors will be notified in a timely manner, and appropriate measures will be taken, including the rejection or retraction of the article and, if applicable, notification to the institutions involved.
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología will maintain a policy of continuous review to ensure that its practices remain aligned with the highest international standards. This commitment includes the constant improvement of editorial processes, training the editorial team on issues of scientific integrity, and periodically updating our editorial ethics policies.
Bioethics
See the Bioética section.
Intellectual Property Policy
Authors retain the copyright and economic rights to their works. Once the manuscript has been accepted, they grant the Quevedo State Technical University, on behalf of the journal Ciencia y Tecnología, a non-exclusive and royalty-free licence to edit, publish, distribute, index and preserve the article, which is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. Authors may deposit the published version in institutional repositories and on personal websites for non-commercial purposes, provided they cite the original publication.
Policies on the use of artificial intelligence (AI)
Mandatory declaration
The use of generative artificial intelligence tools must be explicitly declared in the manuscript. Authors must specify the tool used, its version, the purpose and the section of the manuscript in which it was applied. This declaration must be included both in the manuscript — preferably in the methodology section or in a specific subsection at the end — and in the authorship statement.
Ethical principles
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología adheres to the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) regarding the use of tools such as ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs). It is recognised that these technologies may serve as a support in the processes of writing, editing, analysis and scientific communication, provided that the principles of transparency, ethics, scientific integrity, human responsibility, confidentiality and academic accuracy are upheld.
Authorship
Artificial intelligence tools may not be listed as an author, co-author, scientific lead or formal contributor to the manuscript. Authorship is reserved exclusively for human individuals who have made substantial contributions, in accordance with COPE’s criteria.
Human Responsibility
Ethical, scientific and legal responsibility for the final content rests exclusively with the authors. They must ensure the accuracy of the content, its originality, the validity of the bibliographical references, the interpretation of results and the scientific integrity of the manuscript. The use of AI does not exempt authors from academic or legal responsibilities.
Editorial verification
The editorial team may request further clarification to verify the extent of AI use, the originality of the manuscript, the authenticity of the data or the scientific consistency. The deliberate concealment of significant AI use may be considered an ethical breach.
Authors’ Use of AI
Authors may use generative artificial intelligence tools solely as a supplementary aid for tasks such as improving writing, correcting grammar, linguistic translation, preliminary organization of information, or non-interpretive technical assistance.
It is not permitted to use AI to fabricate data, generate nonexistent results, create false references, manipulate scientific images, replace human analysis, draw conclusions without academic validation, or conceal the actual authorship.
Use of AI by Reviewers
Reviewers must ensure absolute confidentiality regarding the manuscripts they evaluate. Uploading full manuscripts to public AI platforms, sharing confidential information, or using tools that compromise the authors’ privacy or intellectual property is not permitted. They may use AI solely as a linguistic aid, provided that it does not involve disclosure of the content.
Use of AI by the Editorial Team
The editorial team may use AI tools as operational support for preliminary technical review, linguistic verification, editorial organization, and initial detection of inconsistencies. However, final editorial decisions will be made exclusively by human editors.
Policies on Corrections and Retractions
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología is firmly committed to scientific integrity and editorial transparency. For this reason, it has established a clear policy for handling errata, corrections, and retractions, ensuring that published content accurately reflects the results and arguments of the research.
Errata (erratum)
An errata applies only to cases in which the journal Ciencia y Tecnología has made an error without the author’s knowledge. The author has several opportunities to correct errors, such as the author’s name, keywords, title, and errors in the main text.
The journal Ciencia y Tecnología submits the final proof of the peer-reviewed article, ready for publication, to the corresponding author, allowing one week for review and correction. If the response deadline expires without a reply from the authors, the journal Ciencia y Tecnología considers the article approved (since the author has not indicated the need for any changes or corrections) and, therefore, ready for publication.
Corrections
When significant errors are detected in an article already published by the authors, a correction or editorial note will be issued as appropriate. If the error affects key data, conclusions, or the scientific rigor of the work, the journal Ciencia y Tecnología will publish a formal correction linked directly to the original article, without removing the initial version, thereby ensuring the traceability of the information.
Retractions
In cases of fabrication, data manipulation, plagiarism, undeclared conflicts of interest, duplicate publication, or other serious breaches of editorial ethics, a retraction will be issued. This will be clearly identified, publicly accessible, and will explain the reasons behind the decision. A retraction does not imply the removal of the article, but rather its permanent designation as invalid or unreliable, in accordance with COPE guidelines.
Expression of Concern (Editorial Expression of Concern)
The journal may issue an expression of concern when there are reasonable grounds to suspect possible irregularities in an article, but conclusive evidence justifying a correction or retraction is not yet available.
This mechanism is particularly relevant in situations where:
- Institutional investigations are underway.
- Allegations have been received that require further verification.
- The available evidence is insufficient to reach a definitive decision.
The expression of concern will be published as an editorial note linked to the article in question, informing readers of the situation without prejudging the results of the investigation. Once definitive conclusions are available, the journal will update the status of the article accordingly.
Policies on Post-Publication Discussions
At the journal Ciencia y Tecnología, we believe that scientific knowledge is strengthened through debate, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. For this reason, we not only publish rigorous research but also promote spaces for critical discussion where authors, readers, and the academic community can interact—such as social media and other digital academic communities—where articles are shared to generate broader conversations.
We invite both authors and readers to join these spaces, promoting the visibility of their ideas and interdisciplinary exchange. Finally, the journal Ciencia y Tecnología encourages the formation of academic collaborations arising from a shared interest in the topics covered. These may lead to new research projects, co-authorship, presentations, or future publications.
