Ethics Code

Comillas Journal of International Relations is determined to constantly strive for improvement, considering the point of view of the authors, reviewers, and the editorial board, and establishing the processes that ensure the quality of the content and uphold the academic integrity.

The selection of published articles will be based solely on the importance, novelty and clarity of the research and its relevance to the scope of the journal and will always be open to new lines of research, including those that challenge previous research results already published in the journal itself.

The layout of the editorial board is a reflection of the Comillas Journal of International Relations. The editorial board is an important part of the functioning of the journal, the editor periodically informs its members of important developments in the journal, how it is evolving and sets with them the objectives for the journal upon consensus, with them making the final editorial decision.

The editor will ensure the quality of the publication at all times, relying on the journal’s community (boards, authors, reviewers and readers) for which the necessary tools and guidelines will be made available, and will provide channels of communication to receive improvements or complaints.

The journal makes publicly available to the authors, before the submission, the requirements for the publication of an article. Authors, through the submission of the original article to the journal, will be accepting these rules.

Authors who publish an article in Comillas Journal of International Relations are entitled to retain the copyright of their work, granting the journal the necessary permissions to publish it under the Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional licence.

Authors may, and the journal management encourages them to, publish the editor’s version (VoR) on the internet, institutional pages, repositories, and scientific social networks or any other format that they believe may help to disseminate their research, duly citing the journal.

Authors are exempt from paying any kind of fee for submitting their article, nor for editing and open access publication.

The dates of receipt and acceptance will always be public.

The Technical Secretariat will inform the author of the result of the evaluation, giving reasons and if there are any, suggestions for improvement.

The author(s) are committed to citing all sources used in their research and to ensure that their article is completely original and does not include research that has already been published or that the same article is submitted to several journals at the same time. Should exceptionally this be the case, the author will duly justify this exception in the field provided for this purpose in the submission form.

Should plagiarism or redundant content occur, the author(s) will assume full responsibility for the subsequent outcomes (economic, legal or any other kind of consequences). If detected prior to publication, the article will be automatically rejected, and if it is detected afterwards, the journal reserves the right to note it and will withdraw the article from publication.

Should the article include research data, the author(s) certify that this data has been generated in the research itself and that it has not been manipulated in any way to produce a particular result. If the editor or reviewers have suspicions at the time of evaluation, the authors may be asked to submit the raw data or, if detected later, to request them after publication, for which reason these data must be kept for a reasonable period of time. 

The author who submits the article is responsible for including all persons who have played a substantial role in the research and guarantees that they have not incurred in irregularities such as “guest” or “gift” authors.

Likewise, the references included in the article will be the sources consulted in the research and the author(s) certify with their submission that they have not engaged in fraudulent practices such as the manipulation of citations.

The editor will guide reviewers on what is expected of them, especially regarding the originality of articles and plagiarism or redundant content, making available to them the tools at his disposal and the necessary channels for proper communication. He will also ensure that they preserve the confidentiality of the material provided to them and will facilitate the communication of any conflict of interest prior to the start of evaluation.

The journal will value the work of the reviewers who collaborate with the publication, making public the list of those who have collaborated during the year. It will avoid sending new reviews to those reviewers who have made disrespectful or out-of-time reviews. It will try to expand the list of contributors to the extent attainable, trying to consolidate a staff that reflects the journal’s community. And it is committed to selecting the best reviewers available to evaluate each article.

In the drafting of this code, has been taken of the recommendations of the Comittee on Publications Ethics.