About the Journal

 Focus and Scope

La Palabra journal disseminates research in the field of Literature.

Articles may include research perspectives based on the following three lines: 

Literary theory, history and criticism applied to all manifestations of literature, using any interpretative focus.

 Literature and society, which may include research in pedagogy of literature, oral literature, reading promotion, animation and mediation, critical studies of production, editing and circulation of literature, history of reading and books, as well as research where literature is placed in dialogue with other discourses, problems and practices of  the social and human sciences, including that of other arts. 

 Creation-research, where a literary creation project is presented and supported, based on a research process that includes theoretical components, a revision of related literary works, and a reflection about artistic processes employed, contemporary artistic practices and their limits.  

The articles received by the journal are classified as research articles, reflection articles and  review articles  as defined by Publindex in the official archiving document:

1. Research articles:present finished research projects in detail. The structure of the paper generally contains four sections: introduction, methodology, results and conclusions.
2. Reflection articles:clarify the results of a finished research study, from an analytic, interpretive or critical perspective, about a specific topic, using original sources.
3. Review articles:present a summary of the main proposals of a recently published work, or of any work of research or particular interest.They present a careful bibliographic review of at least fifty references.

Articles submitted to La Palabra journal must be in accordance with national and international copyright norms. Articles must be original and unpublished and may not be subject to simultaneous evaluation in a different journal. Articles must not have total or partial editorial commitment other publications. If the article is accepted by the editorial committee, other editors wishing to publish it are obliged to wait for the article to be published in the journal, obtain positive permission from the editor of La Palabra and,explicitly quote the original source. Likewise, when interested in re-publishing previously published works, La Palabra journal commits to asking for publication authorization from the first publisher.

Peer review / reviewers’ obligations

The editorial committee will determine whether submitted articles present the minimum requirements established by journal regarding formal standards, pertinence, and academic and scientific quality. All articles that present the minimum conditions, will be assigned to expert peers for review. The editorial committee will inform the author of the evaluation result within a period of six months.

In order to guarantee the objective evaluation of the article, a «double blind peer review» system will be used, where the author has no knowledge of the peer reviewer’s identity; nor does the evaluator, of the author’s. The peer reviewer may make suggestions for th improvement of the text.

The editorial committee is in charge of selecting peer reviewers for article evaluation. These must mostly be external to the editing institution, and must have no conflict of interests regarding the article to be reviewed. If the reviewer has a conflict of interests with the research the article emerges from or with the mode of financing, he/she must express his reasons to the editorial committee in written form.
Articles will be evaluated using an evaluation sheet containing questions to be answered according to qualitative evaluation criteria, and checkboxes for the qualification of different academic, scientific and editorial parameters.

Editorial obligations of the journal

The editorial committee and scientific committee of the journal, as part of the editorial team, are responsible for designing the guidelines for authors, defining the editorial policies of the journal, and advocating for its scientific and editorial quality. The scientific committee is in charge of defining the criteria of academic quality for each published issue, as well as advising the editorial committee and the editor about deficiencies or improvements related to the disciplinary field covered by the journal.

The editorial committee is responsible for defining the parameters of each call for papers, selecting and evaluating the best articles to be published and following every stage of the editorial process, as well as guaranteeing appropriate scientific quality standards. It is also in charge of highlighting any corrections, rectifications, clarifications or justifications of mistakes made in the editing process.

The editor is responsible for receiving the articles, presenting them to the editorial committee, assigning peer reviewers, and monitoring the evaluation process. He/she is also committed to the confidential development of the evaluation process, by using anonymous peer review, in which neither the author, nor the peers, nor the members of the editorial or scientific committees, know the identities of the article’s authors or peer reviewers, before accepting or rejecting them.

The editorial assistant is in charge of overviewing the whole editorial process, keeping the minutes of the committee meetings, notifying authors, peer reviewers, members of the committees, and the academic and scientific communities of pertinent information. Additionally, he/she is responsible for monitoring journal information and processes of legal deposit, exchange, subscriptions, archiving, evaluation, editing and publication of the articles of every issue.

Editorial ethics

In the editorial process for each issue, the editorial committee will keep strict vigil over each step of the process, from the reception of articles until the publication of the issue.

La Palabra journal commits to safeguarding the ethics of a scientific publication and the persons implied therein: readers, authors, committee members and peer reviewers.

If any ethical publication parameter is violated, La Palabra journal will inform the implied person and the community in general of the reasons for the violation, in written form.

The archive, data bases, and complete academic file of the journal will be kept in reserve, and its integrity will be guaranteed.

The journal commits to complying with the intellectual and ethical standards of a scientific publication,placing the publication’s entitlement to open access over any business transaction.

La Palabra journal, its committees and editor commit to publishing corrections, clarifications, recantations and excuses whenever necessary.

The journal commits to promoting the absence of plagiarism and fraudulent information in its issues.

Although the legal responsibility falls upon the author, the journal promotes transparent and honest information management, by means of its ethical and editorial policies

Intellectual Property

In sending an article to La Palabra journal, the author:

Assumes responsibility for the ideas contained in the article

Commits to respecting third party intellectual property rights

Understands that reception of the article does not guarantee its publication.

Accepts the reproduction and citation of the article for academic purposes, provided the source be explicitly cited.

The authors of approved articles to assign rights to La Palabra, by completing a copyright release form, in which the author authorizes La Palabra journal and Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia the use of his/her patrimonial rights (of reproduction, public communication, transformation and distribution).

Open Access Policy

This journal provides open access to its content, based on the principle that making research freely available to the public, supports researchers with a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Access and Reuse Policies

La Palabra is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. The journal provides open access to its content, based on the principle of offering the public the possibility of accessing research freely in order to contribute to the global exchange of knowledge. Any person is authorized to copy, distribute and publicly communicate any of the texts published in La Palabra as long as it is not for profit, the source is properly cited and reference is made, without exception, to the original publication. Authors may freely disseminate their work and make it available elsewhere as long as they give proper credit to the original publication and, when possible, provide a direct link to the journal.

Publication Frequency

La Palabra journal declares Continuous publication.

Sponsors

• Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia

Digital preservation and self-archiving

La Palabra follows the digital preservation and information security policies of the university for its platforms, so that all its contents published in the Open Journal Systems (OJS) are preserved in time so that any interested reader can consult its volumes and issues in the future.

Likewise, the journal allows its authors to self-archive the articles published in the journal in their respective institutional repositories, institutional web pages or profiles in academic social networks (e.g. ResearchGate), as long as the original publication in the journal is cited, including the specific DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the particular manuscript.