Section Policy

In ESS, the article proposed for publication in one of the issues of the journal must be original and unpublished and must not be submitted simultaneously to other journals or editorial bodies. Likewise, it must be framed within the themes of higher education and belong to one of its sections:

1) Articles in the general section: contributions are received that report on research advances in different thematic areas of higher education, established by an open call for papers. The Editorial Board of ESS evaluates the contribution proposals that have arrived and establishes the appropriate planning of the same. They may be coordinated by one or more persons, as Guest Editor(s) who are responsible for the organization of the section.

2) The articles of the thematic dossiers: one or two dossiers may be organized per issue, these collect manuscripts that address specific topics of higher education, established by an open call. The submission of contributions to this section contemplates the same procedures as for the call for papers to the general section: reception of papers only through the journal's website; observing the rules for authors that detail the format of the papers, and abiding by the peer review process. The dossiers are coordinated by one or more people, as Guest Editor(s), who are responsible for the proposal of the papers and will be subsequently evaluated for publication. The Editorial Board of ESS evaluates the contribution proposals received and establishes the appropriate planning for them. The following typology of articles will be prioritized in this section: 

Types of articles

       - Scientific research

      - Theoretical reflection article

More information about the characteristics and structure of these types of articles can be found here.

Presentations/editorials are also considered, prepared exclusively by the coordinator(s) responsible as editor(s) or guest editor(s) for the current issue and/or thematic Dossier. 

Submissions information table

Scientific evaluation policy

• Arbitration system: external evaluation by pairs and double anonymous

The Scientific Assessment Policy states that all articles undergo an editorial and ethical review by members of the General Editorial Council (Editor and / or Assistant Editors and Production Team) who will verify that the article complies with the rules regarding style and content indicated in the instructions for the authors on the presentation of originals, which include, among other aspects, regulations on copyright and ethical standards of the journal, as well as correct writing and observation of the formal requirements.

If favorable, the article is sent for anonymous scientific evaluation by external reviewers using the "double-anonymous model". These reviewers are part of the Referee Committee, composed of academics and researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean and other regions of the world, and are also external to both the Publishing Entity and the General Editorial Board.

The positive evaluation of each work will depend on the adaptation of the theme to the Journal’s lines, the interest of the article, its contribution to the knowledge of the topic, the novelties provided, the correction of the established relationships, the critical judgment developed, the bibliographic references handled, discussion and indication of recommendations, if any, for possible improvement.

In case of discrepancy, the General Editor may request the review of a third evaluator.

Evaluation outcome. Once the external arbitration process of the article is finished, the Editorial Board will communicate the results of the evaluation, as well as the reviewer’s comments and observations, to the authors by email, to the address they used to send the article and that they registered in the ESS website through the Open Journal System (OJS). Depending on each case evaluated, the reviewers will issue one of the following rulings:

• Publishable: Accept the submission as is or with slight modifications, without further revisions.
• Publishable with modifications: In this case, publication will be conditional upon the author's completion of all required changes. The deadline for modifications will be one month and a brief report explaining the changes introduced and how they meet the editor's requirements must be attached. If this deadline is exceeded, the article will be filed as "unpublishable".
• Re-evaluable: Refers to an article that at the time of review is not publishable, but with the possibility of rewriting and resubmitting the work.  In this case, the resubmission of a new version will not imply any guarantee of publication, but the evaluation process will start again from the beginning. The deadline for sending a new version of the article will be three months and must include a brief report explaining the changes introduced and how they meet the editor's requirements. If this deadline is exceeded, the article will be archived as "unpublishable".
• Unpublishable: Deficiencies identified in the manuscript, which are justified and reasoned with a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, indicate that the publication should be rejected.

Final verdict. Each evaluator’s opinion will be discussed at a meeting of the Editorial Board, which will issue the final verdict. Any final decision on the publication or not of the manuscript is communicated to the authors exclusively in writing.

Final adjustments. If the manuscript has been accepted with modifications, the authors should forward a new version of the article, attending to the demands and suggestions of the external evaluators. These articles will be sent to the Editorial Production Team to verify the validity of the modifications made by the author. Considering the degree of compliance with the modifications requested by the arbitrator, the Editorial Production Team will rule on whether or not the article is to be published. This decision will be communicated to the author by the Journal’s editors.

- Estimated time of the evaluation and publication process

Since it is expected that there will usually be at least 1 or 2 rounds of prior evaluation until the article is SUITABLE for publication, the evaluation process time span is estimated to take from two to four months. Both the evaluator and the author have a period of approximately 30 days per round to carry out their task. (This period is an estimate, since it depends exclusively on the authors and reviewers involved in each article.)

Once the article is SUITABLE for publication, the editing process (which includes the correction of syntax, translation and layout of the article) takes approximately from one to two months.

These periods are always subject to the publication dates of the Journal, which is published every six months. 

Open access policy

This journal provides open access to its content and is based on the principle that making research freely available to the public favors a greater global exchange of knowledge. For this reason, ESS is free of charge and at no time applies any kind of charge or fee to the authors: neither for the submission of their work, nor for the editorial processing (APC), nor for the publication of their articles. Its contents are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which allows the user to copy, use, disseminate, transmit and publicly display its contents, as long as the authorship is cited.

The full license type used: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-4.0) can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. ESS Journal requires authors to accept the Copyright Notice as part of the submission process. Authors retain all rights.

In this way, the journal clearly assumes the Open Access (OAI) policies, in line with the principles of access and free exchange of knowledge, promoted by the international movements contained in the Declarations of Budapest, Bethesda, Berlin, among others. 

Copyright Policy

Authors who have publications with this journal agree to the following terms of the Copyright Notice:

1. At the moment a work is accepted for publication, the authors authorize the Educación Superior y Sociedad journal to carry out:
- The graphic and style editing of the work or part of it.
- The publication, reproduction, distribution and making available to the public of the article, in whole or in part, for non-profit purposes, both in print and electronic media.
- The adaptation of the work to reading, sound, voice and any other available technical representation or mechanism that makes it accessible to people with special conditions that prevent them from reading the article conventionally.
- Any other form of use, process or system known or to be known that is related to the activities and editorial purposes to which the Journal is linked.
2. Authors will retain their copyrights in accordance with the Creative Commons license to which the journal adheres: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International and in accordance with the terms of this license, the reproduction of the published texts, in whole or in part, in any medium or format only for non-commercial purposes (non-profit) and provided that the author is cited.
3. The authors guarantee ESS journal the right to be the first publication medium of the work contained in the submitted document.
4. Authors are encouraged to distribute the final editorial or postprint version of their article in any medium and at any time, depositing it in institutional telematic archives, repositories, libraries, or on their web page indicating the initial publication in this journal. This can lead to interesting exchanges and increase citations of the published work. 

Conflict of Interest Disclosure Policy

In the Journal of Higher Education and Society, the authors of a manuscript, the editors of the receiving journal, and its reviewers (internal and external) must disclose any conflict of interest that could influence the manuscript or its review and approval. Invited, potential reviewers of a manuscript should excuse themselves if they have a conflict of interest with the authors or the topic. ESS guarantees that the most suitable reviewers will be chosen also in terms of thematic and academic compatibility, and in case of controversy, the Journal undertakes to settle these cases through its Editorial Team. ESS guarantees that the most suitable reviewers will be chosen also in terms of thematic and academic compatibility. In case of controversy, the Journal undertakes to settle these cases through its Editorial Team. It will be in charge of arbitrating these cases, and reasonable measures will be taken to identify and prevent the publication of articles in which there have been cases of research misconduct. In no case will the Journal encourage such misconduct, nor will it knowingly allow such misconduct to occur. In the event that the editor or editors of this Journal become aware of any allegations of research misconduct, the editor will address the allegations, retracting or correcting articles where necessary. Publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies, if appropriate. In resolving disputes, we at ESS follow COPE guidelines where applicable.

Plagiarism policy

At ESS, the Plagiarism Policy is implemented from the pre-review or relevance review phase where the Editorial Team of this journal uses the Crossref Similary Check and Ithenticate services for the scanning of all submissions. We use these services in all the papers that pass the editorial triage process and are susceptible to be sent to peer-review, reserving, the journal, the decision to reject papers with an inadequate percentage of similarities. Subsequently, in the double-blind peer review phase, reviewers are provided with a form containing criteria to be considered in the article evaluation process.
In ESS, both reviewers and authors also have a variety of specific tools for plagiarism detection, such as Grammarly, Plagium, Copionic, WriteCheck, PaperRater, Plagarisma.net, Viper, Plagarism. These platforms, which are freely available or licensed, support us in the processes of monitoring originality and controlling plagiarism in the production and submission of manuscripts.

Archiving Policy

ESS Journal is committed to the preservation, restoration and recovery of its contents in the long term, therefore, our website is developed under Open Journal Systems (OJS) which is an open source software developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) that has the Portico or CLOCKSS service, through which the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) operates to digitally preserve OJS journals through the LOCKSS program in order to create permanent archives of the journal, aimed at preserving the original contents and restoring them if necessary, as well as enabling the way for these archives to be distributed among libraries and digital repositories.

Thus, this archiving policy is based on storing the information in formats that are widely used today, thus increasing the likelihood that when a format becomes obsolete there are still programs for its conversion, such as HTML and PDF: HTML and PDF.

In addition to the above, ESS has developed several processes, in accordance with the security protocols of UNESCO IESALC as the journal's sponsor, in order to guarantee the permanent accessibility of the digital objects it houses in its own servers, such as: backup copies, monitoring of the technological environment to foresee possible migrations of obsolete formats or software, maintenance of digital preservation metadata and the use of DOI’s (Digital Object Identifier) as a unique and permanent identifier for electronic publications.

Statement of Privacy

The names and e-mail addresses entered this journal shall be used exclusively for the purposes set forth therein and shall not be provided to third parties or for use for other purposes.

Inclusive and non-discriminatory language policy

In order to contribute to the construction of a more just and egalitarian society, the journal Educación Superior y Sociedad (ESS) frames its editorial policy in favor of the use of inclusive and non-discriminatory language, in all its articles, based on the gender of individuals.

Currently, its application in the Spanish language poses very different solutions, on which no agreement has yet been reached. In this sense, we recommend avoiding the use in texts of expressions that have already been abandoned in contemporary academic and professional Spanish (such as the word “men” to refer to a group of human beings) and all those that make invisible, marginalize or stereotype women and non-binary people. Therefore, it is recommended to use terms such as: student body, students, teachers, learners, people, human being, faculty, research staff, teaching staff, etc.

Likewise, whenever possible, we encourage the use of words and structures to avoid the systematic designation in masculine. However, in order to avoid the graphic overload that would result from using lexical splitting of articles, nouns and adjectives to emphasize the existence of different genders, we have opted for the generic use of the masculine, on the understanding that all mentions of it always represent all persons, regardless of their gender.

Likewise, in keeping with this context, we are constantly striving to transform our editorial bodies and policies to favor gender equality, which we summarize by means of the following actions:
- The existence of a high representation of women in our editorial team as a whole.
- The existence of a percentage of more than 50% of women among those who carry out the evaluation of papers submitted to the journal.
- The style guidelines contain specific recommendations in favor of the use of inclusive and non-discriminatory language in published articles.
- The journal includes the full name of the authors of the papers it publishes.
- In scientific articles, the authors are requested that the source data of the research take into account gender, in order to allow the identification of possible differences.