Code of ethics and commitment to equality

1. Scope and funding

1.1. Scope

Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights is a scientific journal of an international scope that aims to promote reflection and multidisciplinary research on social rights and seeks the highest international excellence.

It is a free and open access journal that publishes two issues a year.

Manuscripts can be written in Spanish, English, French or Italian. They must be the result of original research on the material scope of the journal mentioned. Comments or reflections of experts or personalities who have developed responsibilities in international organizations as well as reviews of scientific publications are also included.

The journal's ethics policy and commitments are based mainly on Elsevier's performance policies, as well as on the guidelines or recommended good practices of the  Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), intended for editors, reviewers and authors.

1.2. Funding

Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights is published by the Universidad Pablo de Olavide. It only has the support of the aforementioned entity.

2. General journal organization

2.1. Bodies.

Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights has an Editorial Team made up of a Director (Editor in Chief), a Managing Editor, an Editorial Board, an Advisory Board and a Review Board.

The Editorial Board is composed of national and foreign professors and experts specialized in the field of Law. Their task is to assist and advice on the publication of the manuscripts received. They are also consulted on relevant issues that arise regarding the operation, improvements and decisions concerning the journal.

The Advisory Board is made up of professors and national and foreign experts in the field of Law. At the request of the Management, they can help and advice on the publication of manuscripts received, evaluate manuscripts received and propose reviewers depending on the subject matter they address.

The Editorial Board, as well as the Advisory Board, is appointed by the Editor in Chief/Director and Managing Editor of the Journal from among professors and/or professionals of recognized prestige. Any potential dismissal will be adopted under the same procedure.

2.2. Obligations and principles

The Journal’s Management:

1. To ensure the continuous improvement of the Journal;
2. To ensure the quality of the articles published;
3. To maintain the academic and scientific integrity of the content of the Journal;
4. To respect freedom of expression;
5. To be willing to publish corrections, in the event that errors are detected, as well as retractions and apologies, if necessary.
6. To preserve the anonymity of the evaluators designated in each case for the evaluation of the articles.
7. Not to place commercial and personal interests before the intellectual, transparency and ethical commitments assumed by the Journal.
8. To continuously review and ensure compliance with the commitments assumed by the Journal together with the Editorial Board.
9. Confidentiality and treatment of potential conflicts of interest within the Journal’s organization

Management, the Editorial Board and the Advisory Board shall not provide information about the manuscripts submitted for publication to any person other than the respective author and the potential or current reviewers.

Under no circumstances may unpublished articles be used for research by members of the Management team, the Editorial Board, the Advisory Board or any other person who may have access to them, except with the express consent of the author. The information or ideas obtained through the evaluation by the evaluators must also be kept secret and must not be used under any circumstances for personal or scientific benefit.

Management, the Editorial Board, the Advisory Board or the Review Board should refrain from evaluating manuscripts with respect to which they may find themselves in a situation of conflict of interest in case of close relationships or connections with the authors or their institutions.

4. Copyright and data processing

By submitting their manuscripts to Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights, authors guarantee that their work is original. In addition, authors assure that it has not been published in any form previously; and that it is not being prepared for publication elsewhere.

Notwithstanding the above, authors do retain the right to present, exhibit, distribute, develop and publish their work to advance their scientific career so long as their original publication in Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights is duly noted.

Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights is an open access journal and its content may be, without prior authorization from the publisher or authors, freely used, read, downloaded, and distributed in any medium for non-commercial purposes only. In all cases, the source and author of the original publication must be cited and any changes made must be clearly indicated so as to ensure the lack of endorsement by the publisher or authors.

The Journal is essentially published online through the Open Journal Systems (OJS), which integrates the OAI (Open Archive Initiative) protocol for greater dissemination and transmission of its contents online, as well as for greater accessibility and reuse of its contents by the scientific community and society in general.

5. Concerning the authors

5.1. Promoting ethical conduct

The Journal's Management shall ensure that the appropriate measures are taken to ensure the quality of the published material and to avoid the publication of plagiarism and non-original works.

5.2. Authors guidelines

The publication process and instructions will be published and kept duly updated in the Journal so that authors have all the information they need at all times.

5.3. Review and decision-making process and publication

The review process is subject to strict confidentiality conditions. Authors will not know the identity of the reviewers, thus avoiding conflicts of interest that may arise. In this regard, the Journal's Management will have a strict duty of confidentiality.

Decisions regarding the acceptance or rejection of an article for publication shall be based solely and exclusively on the quality of the article, that is, on its clarity, originality, and relevance, as well as on its suitability to the objectives and scope of the journal. In any case, decisions must always be well-founded. Ultimately, the Editor in Chief and Managing Editor of the journal will be responsible, once the evaluation process has been completed, and after prior consultation with the Editorial Board, for taking the decision of which manuscripts submitted to the journal will finally be published in it.

In no case will articles be rejected due to criticisms or opinions diverging from majority positions and/or expressed by members of the Journal's bodies (Management, Editorial Board and/or Advisory Board), as long as they are high quality and justified contributions.

Likewise, the decision, whether to accept or reject, will always be communicated to the author, and must be well-founded, especially in the case of rejection. This decision should not be subsequently modified, unless there have been serious problems in the publication process, which should also be duly justified.

In any case, changes in the structure of the journal will not affect decisions previously taken regarding the acceptance or rejection of manuscripts submitted for publication.

5.4. Authors’ obligations

- Originality and accuracy of data: Authors that original manuscripts to Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights attest that the work is original and unpublished, that it does not contain parts of other authors or other fragments of works already published by the authors. In addition, they confirm the veracity of the data.

- Multiple and/or repetitive publications: Author should not publish articles in which the same results are repeated in more than one scientific journal or any other publication of an academic or non-academic nature.

- Attributions, citations and references: Authors must always provide the correct indication of the sources and contributions mentioned in the article along with their DOI or URL if any.

- Authorship: Authorship of articles should be limited to persons who have contributed significantly to the determination, design and preparation of the work. All significant contributors should be cited as co-authors. If other persons have participated in any substantive aspects of the work, they should be appropriately acknowledged in the article. Authors should ensure that all co-authors are duly included, and that no person is unjustifiably mentioned as an author. Likewise, all authors should have seen and approved the final version of the paper and its submission for publication.

- Access and Retention: If the members of the Editorial Board -or, where appropriate, the Review Board - consider it appropriate, the authors of the articles should also make research sources or data available, which may be retained for a reasonable period of time after publication and possibly be made accessible.

- Conflict of interest and disclosure: Authors are required to declare explicitly that there are no conflicts of interest that may have influenced the results obtained or the interpretations proposed. Authors must also indicate any agency and/or project funding from which the research article arises.

- Errors in published articles: When authors identify an important error or inaccuracy in their article, they should immediately inform Management and provide them with all the necessary information to list the pertinent corrections at the bottom of the article (always in a margin note, so as not to alter the publication).

- Responsibility: The responsibility for the content of the articles published in Lex Social lies exclusively with the authors. They also agree to carry out a review of the most current and relevant scientific literature on the subject-matter, taking into account the different schools of thought in a pluralistic manner.

5.5. Review Board members’ commitments

- Contribution to the editorial decision: Reviewers assume the commitment to carry out and guarantee a critical, honest, objective, constructive and unbiased review of both the scientific and literary quality of the manuscript.

- Respect for review times: Reviewers who do not feel competent in the subject matter to evaluate or who is unable to complete the evaluation in the scheduled time, should immediately notify the editors. Reviewers undertake to evaluate the papers in the shortest possible time in order to meet the deadline, set at 30 days from acceptance. Acceptance must be issued within a maximum of 8 days from the sending of the request.

- Confidentiality: Each assigned manuscript should be treated as confidential. Therefore, these texts should not be discussed with others without the express consent of the editors. Peer reviewers will not know the authors or the other reviewer.

- Objectivity: Peer review should be conducted in an impartial manner. Reviewers are obliged to give reasons for each of their evaluations, always using the "ad hoc" review template. Reviewers will deliver a complete critical report with appropriate references according to Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights review protocol.

- Text visualization: Reviewers undertake to accurately indicate the bibliographical references of fundamental works possibly forgotten by the author. Reviewers should also inform the editors of any similarities or overlaps of the manuscript with other published works.

- Anonymity: To ensure that the review process is as objective, impartial and transparent as possible, the identity of the authors as well as any information about the origin of the document is suppressed before the papers are sent for peer review. If, for any reason, the identity of the authors, their institutional affiliations or any other data that jeopardizes the anonymity of the document is compromised, reviewers must immediately notify the Editor in Chief or Managing Editor and refrain from carrying out their evaluation.

5.6. Management Team commitments

- Publication decision: Management (henceforth, “editors”) will guarantee the selection of the most qualified and scientifically specialized reviewers to issue a critical and expert evaluation of the work, with the least possible biases. Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights chooses to select two reviewers for each paper in order to guarantee greater objectivity and correct assessment in the review process. In the case of different evaluations, a third reviewer would be selected.

- Honesty: Editors evaluate the articles submitted for publication on the basis of the scientific merit of the contents, without discrimination of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, nationality or political opinion of the authors.

- Confidentiality: The entire team is committed to not disclose information related to the manuscripts submitted for publication to persons other than authors, reviewers and editors, as well as to the confidentiality of the manuscripts, their authors and reviewers, so that anonymity and intellectual integrity of the entire process is preserved.

- Conflict of interest and disclosure: the team undertakes not to use in their research the contents of the articles submitted for publication without the written consent of the authors.

- Respect for deadlines: The team is committed to comply with the time limits for reviews and publication of accepted papers, to ensure a rapid dissemination of their results.

5.7. Rights

a) Authors have the right to withdraw the article submitted for evaluation at any point throughout the evaluation process and up until its publication.

b) The reviewers have the right to request help from the Journal's Management. They also have the right to ask the Journal's Management for accreditation of their collaboration with the Journal in the evaluation of manuscripts.

6. Plagiarism

In accordance with its publication policies, the journal Lex Social obliges each manuscript to be detected for plagiarism. These are sent to Urkund for detection. If, after the plagiarism check, the coincidences found in each study are considerable, they are analysed in detail, since a result showing a high percentage of similarity does not automatically imply that plagiarism exists. Detections are analysed by the Management team. After a review, a final decision is made. If plagiarism is found, the author is contacted so that they may proceed, depending on the conclusions, to a correction or the work is rejected.

If plagiarism is detected once the article has been published, the author will be contacted to proceed in the same terms as above.

In the case of an issue that is coordinated or directed by another responsible ad hoc person, usually in cases where the publication is the result of a research group or stem from the Proceedings of scientific events, any communication in this regard will also be made with them, as the person responsible for having carried out this evaluation and editing tasks.

7. Commitment to gender equality

Lex Social, Journal of Social Rights expresses its commitment to the use of inclusive and non-sexist language. To this end, it recommends authors to use it in the "Guidelines" for the submission of any contribution (study, commentary, review or analysis) and that it be oriented according to the Guide for non-sexist language prepared by the Ministry of Equality.

In the event that there are differences in the source data in terms of sex, this fact should be mentioned in the article.

On the other hand, it is emphasized that the journal advocates equal gender representation in the composition of the different Committees and that even in the Management Team (Management and General Secretariat), where the female gender is usually underrepresented, most of its members are women.

8. Archive policy

The journal incorporates CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), LOCKSS and PKP Preservation Networks that enable libraries to preserve selected electronic journals by regularly checking registered journal websites for recently published content and archiving it for future preservation.