Statement of Ethics

Odisseia, a journal of the Graduate Program in Language Studies, DECLARES that it seeks to maintain high standards of ethics and good publishing practices. Thus, the Journal is committed to taking necessary measures to follow this statement, as it guides its editors, reviewers (members of the Editorial Board and ad hoc reviewers) and authors to adopt international principles of conduct and editorial practice, the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. Below are the ethical conduct guidelines for editors, reviewers and authors, which define good publishing practices:

Odisseia editors are responsible for the final decision to accept/reject the manuscripts evaluated by the reviewers. However, this decision is not arbitrary and/or random: it is based on the evaluations made by the reviewers, the focus and scope of the journal, the guidelines for the authors, and the originality of the manuscript [submissions with ethical issues, such as defamation, copyright infringement and plagiarism (which includes self-plagiarism), will be rejected for publication]. Besides, throughout the evaluation process, they do not make the editorial decision based on the authors’ race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality and/or ideological position. In addition, they follow the confidentiality principle of being the only ones to have access to privileged information on the authors of the manuscripts, which means that the disclosure of any information about the authors and/or the submitted texts to third parties is prohibited. In addition, editors, following this ethical principle, are committed to: (1) making a prior verification of the submitted manuscripts in order to find any instance of plagiarism (via anti-plagiarism softwares) and/or marks of authorship; (2) choosing reviewers who do not have any conflict of interest with the authors, and (3) protecting the identity of the reviewers. If there are, therefore, ethical complaints about any manuscript submitted or published, editors should make the necessary decisions.

The reviewers, members of the editorial board of the journal or other knowledgeable professors who will be ad hoc reviewers, will evaluate the manuscripts submitted under their responsibility in an objective, clear, and argumentative manner. This implies that inappropriate, ironic or offensive comments are neither accepted nor acceptable. Because the reviewer’s role is relevant to the decision-making process, their evaluation helps both the editors, when they have to decide to accept or reject the submission, and the authors, by giving them meaningful comments to improve the text. In light of this, reviewers should immediately notify editors if they are available to evaluate the texts and/or if they feel qualified to carry out the task, since the manuscript may not be within the reviewers’ research scope. By accepting the task of evaluating the manuscript, the reviewer agrees to: (a) follow the criterion of confidentiality about the manuscript and its evaluation process; (2) reject the evaluation task if there is a conflict of interest, that is, if evaluating the manuscript privileges its author because there is some type of relationship or connection between the reviewer and the author (or company or research institution); (3) immediately notify the editors of the existence of substantial similarity between the manuscript under review and other published texts.

The authors, in the process of submitting the manuscripts, must declare to follow ethical standards of publication. Thus, they declare that: (1) the contribution is original and unpublished; (2) the manuscript is not being evaluated for publication by another journal; (3) in case the text uses images from other sources (that is, they are not free or were not created by the authors), the permission for the use of images was sent to the editors; (4) in the case of translated articles, the permission to publish the translation was sent to the editors; (5) the text does not fall into the situations described in Editorial Policy on Plagiarism. In addition, if the submission is the result of human research, the authors are committed to following the ethical principles of this type of research and including, in the manuscript, the approval process number of the Ethics Committee of their institution. They are also committed to (1) notifying the editors of any significant errors or inaccuracies they may encounter in their submission for due correction; (2) limiting authorship to colleagues who have actually made significant contributions to the work; in other words, the inclusion of coauthors who did not participate directly in the research goes against the ethical principles of publication; (4) disclosing the source(s) of financial support for the conduction of their research; (5) revising the text based on the pertinence of the comments made by the reviewers, seeking to follow them; if they consider any comment not relevant, they should explain to the editors why they disregard it.