Editorial policies

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE POLITICS
DIGITAL PRESERVATION POLICIES
POLITICS FOR THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGIES
PREPRINT PUBLICATION POLICY
OPEN-SCIENCE POLITICS
OPEN-ACCESS AND LICENSING POLITICS
IDENTIFICATION OF AUTHORSHIP ROLES IN RESEARCH ARTICLES

Diversity and inclusive language politics

Attention must be paid to the general principles of writing about every person and their personal characteristics without prejudices, making use of inclusive and non-discriminatory language to avoid gender bias. For this, we recommend consulting the APA normative, a reliable guide that provides clear and comprehensive instructions: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/general-principles 

Digital preservation policies

Currently, the MedUNAB journal is covered by the PORTICO Digital Preservation Service which provides reliable preservation services for electronic resources and ensures that the digital content is available and accessible to researchers, academics, and students.

This digital preservation system operates on a community model in which its own reviews and external peer certifications are guaranteed to ensure the quality and safety.

Long-term digital preservation is ensured by the fulfillment of the following key factors:

  1. Usability: the intellectual content must remain usable even with technological changes, for which the PORTICO service monitors constant threats of technological obsolescence and takes the measures to face them.
  2. Authenticity: the content must be an authentic and verifiable replica of the original material, for which the PORTICO service maintains a constant audit of the files and its metadata.
  3. Visibility: the content must have logical bibliographic metadata that allows it to be found over time. The PORTICO service ensures that the preserved content has these characteristics so that it is always found.
  4. Accessibility: the content must be available for its use. The PORTICO service always maintains the titles available for users.

MedUNAB also adheres to the archive politics established by the DOAJ Directory Open Access Journals for the preservation of long-term content.

Politics for the use of artificial intelligence technologies

The Journal adopts the policies established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), available in its section on the use of artificial intelligence (https://publicationethics.org/cope-focus/cope-focus-artificial-intelligence), along with the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), regarding the use of this technology, as set out below:

Authors must disclose, when submitting the manuscript, whether AI-assisted technologies (such as large language models, chatbots, or image generators) were used to produce any part of the work. If so, the cover letter and the submitted manuscript must include a description of the technologies used and what they produced. For example, if the AI was used to assist with writing, this should be described in the Acknowledgments section. If the AI was used for data collection, analysis, or the generation of figures and tables, this should be described in the Methods section.

Considering that the authors of the manuscript are responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, chatbots or other AI-assisted technologies cannot be listed as authors or coauthors.

All AI-generated materials must be carefully reviewed and edited by the authors to avoid submitting results that appear authoritative and are incorrect, incomplete, or biased.

The authors must confirm that there is no plagiarism of text or images in the AI-generated materials. Authors must ensure that all quoted material is correctly attributed, including

Cited material made by AI  is not accepted. Primary sources must be cited.

Preprint Publication Policy 

MedUNAB accepts manuscripts that have been published previously in a preprint non-profit-driven server. The authors must notify MedUNAB about any preprint related to the sent manuscript.

Open-science politics

When submitting the research manuscript, authors are encouraged to upload the data that underlie the findings reported in the manuscript. A repository that may be institutional but should be publicly accessible and appropriate for datasets (source databases or tabulated data sets) is suggested while maintaining the confidentiality of study participants (anonymous version). The Dataset can also be created using any platform, but the journal recommends the use of some: 

The public dataset aims to provide archives so that evaluators, editors, and readers may observe and access the original results data. Different archives exist for different types of documents associated with the datasets: Excel, Word, PDF, videos, images, and interviews. 

Once the article has been approved for publication, the author will be asked to provide the reference of the dataset's deposit place, including the DOI. The authors must include the respective citation in the methods section and in the reference list (see how to reference a data set in the reference section). For articles that require the attachment of a specific appendix, it is suggested that this document be attached to the dataset and the reference in the results section. 

Open-access and licensing politics

This Journal provides immediate access to its content under the principle of support and knowledge exchange. The publications of the MedUNAB journal are under a Creative Commons Attribution License (Creative Commons, CC) type 4.0, with attribution and non-commercial rights, that permit unlimited use, distribution, and reproduction in any way, as long as the original author and source are correctly cited. MedUNAB gives the authors a PDF document of the manuscript accepted by the author that may be deposited in a non-commercial repository after its publication. 

Identification of Authorship Roles in Research Articles

The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) provides a framework to distinguish and recognize each coauthor´s contribution to a scientific article. It is used to represent the responsibilities undertaken by each coauthor in the scholarly production of a research document. Its primary objective is to provide appropriate credit to all those who participated in the research process. 

Delineating each individual’s contribution ensures that their work is properly acknowledged in the reporting of results. These practices comply with the authorship criteria defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). 

The CRediT taxonomy defines fourteen contributor roles for recognizing author contributions in publications. Detailed documentation and information on the CRediT taxonomy can be found on the Editorial Ciencias Medicas website http://www.ecimed.sld.cu/2020/06/27/taxonomia-credit/ and at Elsevier’s “CRediT author statement” page https://www.elsevier.com/authors/policies-and-guidelines/credit-author-statement.