Policies

Ethics declaration

The journal ZARCH is firmly committed to the principles of academic integrity, transparency, and best practices in the scientific publication process. In order to ensure the quality and credibility of the published content, this journal adheres to the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The full guidelines are available at: https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines

Editorial Commitments

The Editorial Board of ZARCH ensures compliance with editorial best practices, guaranteeing a transparent, rigorous, and confidential review process. It is committed to acting diligently in the event of suspected academic misconduct, publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, or apologies when necessary. The journal’s policies regarding peer review, authorship, plagiarism, digital preservation, and the use of generative AI are detailed in the relevant sections of this website and form an integral part of this ethical commitment.

Peer Review and Confidentiality

All manuscripts submitted to ZARCH undergo blind peer review. The anonymity of both authors and reviewers, as well as the confidentiality of the reviewed content and related communications, is guaranteed. All parties involved in the review process commit to not using or disclosing the content prior to publication.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors, reviewers, and members of the editorial team are required to declare any potential conflict of interest that may affect the objectivity of the editorial or review process. Specific guidelines on this matter can be found in the journal’s authorship policy and must be strictly followed.

Retractions and Corrections

In the event of significant errors, scientific misconduct, or plagiarism, the journal will follow COPE protocols to issue corrections, retractions, or expressions of concern. These actions will be properly documented, made public, and linked to the affected article, thereby ensuring academic record traceability.

Integrity in Publication

All authors, reviewers, and editors are expected to maintain an honest, professional, and responsible conduct in the pursuit of knowledge.
For this reason, the journal publishes a set of specific policies that further develop and complement this Ethical Statement. These include:

  • Open Access and No Submission Charges Policy
  • Content Publication Permissions Policy
  • Authorship Policy
  • Funding Disclosure Policy
  • Plagiarism Policy
  • Generative AI Use in Academic Writing Policy
  • Digital Preservation Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Editorial best practices on gender equality

All of these policies are available in the corresponding sections of this website.

Open Access and Free Submission Policy

This journal provides immediate open access (without embargo period) to its content, at no cost or prior registration online. We abide by the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. For the same token, the submission, revision and publishing of texts is also free of charge to the authors.

The journal follows the OAI interoperability protocol (https://www.openarchives.org/) available at https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/zarch/oai.

Permissions for the publication of contents

Our journal applies a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license to its contents. This means that sharing, copying, and redistribution of the material in any medium or format is permitted under the following conditions:

  • Attribution: proper credit must be given to the author(s), a link to the license must be provided, and any changes made must be indicated, always acknowledging the source;
  • Non-commercial: the material may not be used for commercial purposes;
  • No derivative works: the material may not be distributed in modified, remixed, or transformed versions, nor used to create derivative works.

Authors retain full copyright of their texts without restrictions and preserve the rights to further publication. Additionally, authors are allowed to deposit the full text of their articles in institutional or subject-specific open access repositories, provided the original license is respected. Supplementary material may also be deposited in institutional open access repositories, encouraging the linkage between published articles and their associated materials through the use of unique and persistent identifiers (such as DOI), ensuring long-term accessibility and integrity.

Autorship Policy

This journal considers an author of a published paper to be a person who has made a significant intellectual contribution to it. Following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the following requirements must be met in order to be listed as an author:

1 - To have participated in the conception and design, or in the acquisition of the data, or in the analysis and interpretation of the data of the work that has resulted in the article.
2 - Have participated in the drafting or critical revision of the text.
3 - Have approved the version that is finally published.

Those who do not meet these three criteria can only be acknowledged in the acknowledgements. To avoid the risk of fictitious or usurped authorship, it is recommended that, at the time of submitting the document, all authors agree on their contributions and the order in which they will appear in the list of co-authors.

To specify the contribution of each author to the paper, it is recommended to use the criteria established by the CRediT taxonomy (Contributor Roles Taxonomy).

The contribution of each authorship should be stated at the end of the article in a note entitled ‘Statement of authorship contribution’.

Authors can use any of the three most common practices to determine the order in which the article is signed:

  • ‘First-last-author-emphasis’ approach (FLAE): the first signature and the last signature are equally important. Between them, the order of signature is considered to indicate decreasing contributions.
  • Sequence-determines-credit approach (SDC): the order indicates importance.
  • Equal contribution norm (EC): alphabetical sequence is used to recognise similar contributions or to avoid disputes in collaborative groups.

The opinions and facts stated in each article are the sole responsibility of the authors, as well as the ethical appropriateness of the article. Furthermore, they must make it explicit that the text is their own and that the intellectual property rights of third parties are respected. It is also their responsibility to ensure that they have permission to use, reproduce and print material not owned/authored by them (tables, graphs, maps, diagrams, photographs, etc.). Authors, by submitting an article, agree that it is original and has not been submitted for consideration or published in any other journal.

To eliminate name confusion and ensure proper attribution of publications and citations, this journal suggest the use of the ORCID ID for all authorships. Although it alone cannot guarantee a secure identity, the adoption of ORCID is a further check against authorship identity fraud.

Conflict of Interest

When submitting an original manuscript, authors declare by default that there is no conflict of interest that could influence the content of the article. If there is any situation that may represent a conflict—such as financial relationships (employment, consultancies, company shares, patent authorship), or personal, academic, or ideological ties that could affect the objectivity of the work—this must be disclosed at the time of submission to the Editorial Board.

Funding Sources Policy

Authors submitting to the journal must declare whether they have received financial support for conducting their research. At the time of article submission, any financial support received (from public or private institutions) for data collection, analysis, interpretation of results, or even for the writing of the manuscript must be disclosed.

All relevant information about the funding sources must be clearly identified, including the name of the funding institution, the funding identification number, and a description of the role the funder played in the research process.

This information must appear in two places:

  • In the metadata: when entering the article’s metadata, this information must be included in the ‘funding data’ section. It is mandatory to state the name of the funder and the grant identification code.
  • In the article: this information must be included in a specific ‘Funding’ section.

Plagiarism Policy

ZARCH declares its commitment to integrity and respect for the published work. For this reason, plagiarism is strictly forbidden. The texts identified as plagiarism, or with fraudulent content, will be removed or will get unpublished. All the manuscripts submitted are verified by the Editorial Board, which analyses them for semantic coincidence using the Compilatio anti-plagiarism software. In these cases, the journal will act as quickly as possible. When accepting the terms and agreements expressed by our journal, the authors must guarantee that the paper and the materials associated to it are original and do not infringe authors’ right. In case of shared authorship, co-authors must justify full consensus and guarantee that the work has not been previously published in any other format.

Generative AI Policy for Academic Writing

Authors must declare the use of generative AI in scientific writing upon submission of the paper. The following guidance refers only to the writing process, and not to the use of AI tools to analyse and draw insights from data as part of the research process:

  • Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies should only be used in the writing process to improve the readability and language of the manuscript.
  • The technology must be applied with human oversight and control and authors should carefully review and edit the result, as AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete or biased. Authors are ultimately responsible and accountable for the contents of the work.

Authors must not list or cite AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author on the manuscript since authorship implies responsibilities and tasks that can only be attributed to and performed by humans.

The use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing must be declared by adding a statement at the end of the manuscript when the paper is first submitted. The statement will appear in the published work and should be placed in a new section before the references list.

Digital Preservation Policy

Papiro, the platform from which ZARCH is published, carries out the following tasks periodically to ensure the preservation of digital files:

  • Server update and maintenance.
  • Monitoring of the technological environment to anticipate possible format or software migrations.
  • Digital preservation metadata.
  • Use of DOI.

In addition, the proper functioning of the hardware is ensured through the use of high-performance professional servers, and the software is maintained by updating OJS versions and verifying their correct operation.

The files published on this website are available in easily reproducible formats, such as PDF.

This journal is part of the Public Knowledge Project’s Private LOCKSS Network (PKP-PLN), which generates a decentralized archive system distributed among collaborating libraries. Its aim is to create permanent archives of the journal to preserve the original content and enable its restoration if necessary. Archived content can be consulted on the ISSN Portal.

Privacy policy

User registration online is possible through the OJS platform for the participation as author or to report the interest in participating as an external reviewer. The privacy policy of the journal is governed by the rules of data protection or Reglamento General de Protección de Datos (RGPD): user data will not be distributed without their explicit permission and, in the event that they become part of a mailing list, it will be exclusively for the communicating of information relating to the journal. Upon request by e-mail, a user's email address is removed from mailing lists. By the same procedure, all data held about the user will be made available to the user.

Editorial best practices on gender equality

In its commitment to gender equality, ZARCH applies the following measures:

  • from issue 17 publishes authorship statistics disaggregated by sex
  • includes the full names of authors, avoiding initials, particles, and abbreviations
  • includes submission guidelines that recommend the use of inclusive and non-sexist language
  • encourages the consideration of sex/gender analysis in research when relevant, addressing its impact on research design, methodology, results, discussion, limitations, and conclusions