About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The goal of the Forum Journal is to present its readers with previously unpublished articles, both in Spanish and English, showing research results in political science, law, international relations and other disciplines related with the local and national political reality. The journal aims to articulate the academic debate with diverse social and political problems and dynamics.The Forum journal is aimed at academics interested in empirical and theoretical studies of political sciences, law, international relations and other disciplines related. Forum was founded in 2011 by the Political Science Department of the Faculty of Human and Economic Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Sede Medellín). Its publication is bi-annual (January-June and July-December). Neither authors nor readers have charge for posting or accessing our publication.

Peer Review Process

When an article is received, the editorial team and Editorial Committee evaluates if it fulfills all the basic requirements of the Forum Journal, including format, quality (objective, theoretical framework, methodology, conclusions and bibliography) and relevance of the document. The aspects of formal presentation and the citation standards of the American Psychological Association (APA), latest edition.

After this initial revision, the articles that will begin the evaluation process are selected. Text are then submitted for evaluation to two academic peers, national and international (at least 50% with international affiliation) and to the editorial team, which states its concept. The editorial team has the final word regarding the contents to be published. In the event of contradictory reviews, a third reviewer will be appointed. The decision is then communicated to the authors within a maximum period of six months, counted from the submission date of the article.

The authors must make the adjustments requested by the evaluators and the Editorial Team within the period indicated. The journal reserves the last word on the publication of the articles and the number in which they are included, which depends on compliance with the delivery of the requested documentation. If after reviewing the content it is observed that the author has not incorporated the requested changes, the Editorial Team and the Editorial Committee may decide not to publish the article.

During the editing process, the Editorial Team will communicate with the authors to resolve any concerns regarding the content. However, Forum magazine reserves the right to make minor stylistic corrections.

Rejection Rate

2021 (33 %)

2022 (37,5 %)

Open Access Policy

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

Publication Frequency

Forum. Revista Departamento de Ciencia Política is published in January and July

Statement of Ethics and Good Practice

Publication and Authorship

The journal Forum. Revista Departamento de Ciencia Política, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/forum/index) states its ethics policy with the purpose of adopting all required measures to prevent any kind of fraud, plagiarism and editorial malpractice.

The organizational structure of the Forum Journal is the following: editorial team – composed of a chief editor and an editorial assistant-, editorial committee, scientific committee and coordinator of journals, and editorial center. Members of the editorial and scientific committees are evaluated biannually according to their academic authority in the discipline and to their intellectual production.

Articles submitted for publishing in the Forum Journal must be original and unpublished; they cannot be in any other evaluation process nor have editorial commitments with any other publication. If, after an article has been published in the Forum Journal, and its authors wish to include it in a different publication (journal, compilation or book), they must request a written authorization from the chief editor and make an explicit reference to the original publication. Likewise, if the Forum Journal wishes to reproduce an article that has already been published elsewhere, the Forum Journal is responsible for requesting the authorization from the editorial where it was first published.

Responsibilities of the Chief Editor and Editorial Responsibilities

The chief editor must always act in an objective and fair manner, without discriminating authors on sexual, religious, political or regional grounds. Likewise, the chief editor must review, edit and publish academic contributions according only to their academic merits and without considering any type of commercial influence or non-academic interest.

The chief editor of the Forum Journal, in collaboration with the editorial committee, has the responsibility of deciding which articles are published. The selection is made based on recommendations resulting from the evaluation of the article and from the editorial revision process, in which criteria regarding quality, relevance, originality and contribution to the discipline are considered. The editorial team has the final word on the publishing of an article and on the edition of the journal in which it will appear. The journal will be published on the previously stipulated dates, as long as authors deliver all requested documentation in time. The Forum Journal reserves the right to apply minor style-editing corrections before publishing.

The chief editor must be well informed about current legal aspects regarding libel, copyright and plagiarism, and must follow the adequate procedure in order to resolve possible complaints or misunderstandings of an ethical nature or related to a conflict of interests. The editor and the editorial committee will act in accordance with the regulations, policies, and proceedings established by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Whenever a possible conflict of interests is identified, authors will be given the opportunity to reply. Any type of complaint must be substantiated with written documents that provide evidence of the alleged inappropriate behavior. If necessary, the chief editor must make sure that an investigation, leading to an expedite solution of the problem, takes place. Whenever inexactitudes or errors are found in published content, corrections and clarifications are published on the website of the Forum Journal.

As soon as an edition of the Forum Journal is published, the editorial team is responsible for its distribution among collaborators, evaluators, repositories, and national and international indexing systems (Colciencias-Publindex); and among institutions with which exchange agreements have been established. The editorial team is also responsible for delivering the journal to active subscribers.

Responsibilities of the Editorial Committee / Scientific Committee

The members of the editorial board are academics with a recognized track record and serve as consultants to the journal's editorial team for the definition of changes in the journal's academic focus, content and editorial image. Its central mission is to evaluate the operation of the journal and suggest recommendations for its improvement. Its members may propose themes for monographic issue. When requested by the director-editor, its members may suggest lists of peer reviewers or even serve as jurors themselves.

Responsibilities of Peer Reviewers

When an article is received, the editorial team evaluates if it fulfills all the basic requirements of the Forum Journal, including format, quality (objective, theoretical framework, methodology, conclusions and bibliography) and relevance of the document. After this initial revision, the articles that will begin the evaluation process are selected. Text are then submitted for evaluation to two academic peers, national and international (at least one of them with international affiliations) and to the editorial team, which states its concept. The editorial team has the final word regarding the contents to be published. The decision is then communicated to the authors within a maximum period of six months, counted from the submission date of the article. If the evaluation process exceeds that time, the editorial team must inform the authors. Reviewers are required to explicitly state, in the evaluation format, that they do not have any conflict of interests regarding the authors and the topics that they will review. In case of any doubt, the reviewer will be replaced.

The Forum Journal uses an evaluation format with questions regarding academic and editorial criteria. Reviewers are responsible for suggesting acceptance, rejection or approval with modifications to the refereed article. Authors and reviewers are kept anonymous during the evaluation process.

Responsibilities of Authors

Authors must submit articles through the online platform of the Forum Journal, creating first a username in the following link: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/forum/user/register during the established dates of each open submissions period. Author guidelines, including all the requisites for article submission and editorial norms are available in the last pages of the journal’s print version or in the following link: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/forum/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Authors take responsibility for the ideas expressed in published contents and for the ethical suitability of the article. Authors must explicitly state their authorship and declare that the article respects third party copyrights. Authors are also responsible for requesting and obtaining authorization to use, reproduce, and print any material that is not of their own authorship or that they do not own (tables, graphs, maps, diagrams, photos, images, etc.).

Authors agree to subject their manuscripts to an evaluation by external peers and to take their suggestions into account, as well as those of the editorial team. Modifications to articles must be done within the time period established by the editorial team. After the editorial team receives the modified articles and verifies that the appropriate changes have been made, authors are informed of the editorial team’s definitive approval. Whenever texts submitted to the Forum Journal are not accepted for publication, the editorial team notifies the authors, explaining the reasons. During the editing process, the editorial team may consult with the authors in order to resolve questions regarding the article. During the evaluation and editing processes, emails are the preferred communication means between the journal and the authors.

In order for their articles to appear in the Forum Journal (electronic and print versions), authors of accepted texts must authorize the Universidad Nacional de Colombia to make use of their copyrights (reproduction, public communication, transformation and distribution) by signing the document that includes the “Authorization of the Use of Intellectual Property Rights”. In the same document, authors confirm their authorship of the text and declare that they respect third party intellectual property rights.

Indexing

The journal is found in the following databases with a selection committee (BBCS), directories, catalogs and networks:

Índice Bibliográfico Nacional Publindex (IBN Publindex)

AmeliCA

Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico - REDIB

Dialnet, Universidad de la Rioja, España

DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals

CLASE

CLACSO. Red de Bibliotecas Virtuales, Argentina

European Reference Index for the Humanities and
Social Sciences (ERIHPlus). Noruega

EBSCO - Academic Search Ultimate. Estados Unidos

Sherpa/Romeo

ULRICHS

C.I.R.C. EC3metrics

ROAD. Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources-ISSN

Academia.edu, Estados Unidos

Google Académico

Statistics (Google Analytics - Users) (Visite)

Proposed of a monographic issue

The guest editors send to the journal's email forum_med@unal.edu.co the proposal for the monographic issue with the following points: title, objective of the call, thematic axes and the academic information of the guest editors (last academic title, institutional affiliation , email and Orcid), not to exceed 500 words. The editorial committee of the journal evaluates the proposal and the concept will be notified later. If the proposal is accepted, the call is open to the academic community.

Guest editor features

Disseminate the call in academic and social networks.

Check whether the articles in the dossier meet the objective of the call.

Suggest peer reviewers of dossier articles sent for external review.

Suggest content for the Documents and Reviews sections. The final approval of these contents is given by the editorial committee of the journal.

Write the presentation of the dossier. It can be done in an article format, including theoretical, methodological discussions or a state of the art, as well as presenting the contents.

Suggest the publication order of the dossier articles.

Disseminate the published edition.

Functions of the editorial team

Disseminate the call in academic and social networks.

Receive the contents of the dossier through the journal's OJS platform https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/forum/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

Consolidate the articles of the dossier in a list with the data of the authors.

Find evaluators and send the selected articles to external evaluation, as well as consolidate the concepts of each content once evaluated.

Define the articles that are accepted or rejected according to the concepts of external evaluations.

Communicate to the authors about the editorial processes and decisions of the articles.

Notify guest editors of articles that were accepted and rejected, based on external evaluations.

Edit and do the style correction of the article.

Editorial design, publish and dissemination the issue.

Self-archiving

FORUM. Revista Departamento de Ciencia Política allows the self-archiving of articles received in institutional or thematic repositories and on personal web pages, both in the pre-print archive (draft of a work) and post-print (the corrected and peer-reviewed version), up to the final version (layout as it will be published in the magazine).

Backup

The preservation of the content of the journal in case it ceases to be published (access to the archive) or in any other eventuality is guaranteed through the use of the LOCKSS system (https://www.lockss.org/join-lockss/networks/global -lockss-network). The following link verifies the use of this application https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/forum/gateway/lockss

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Reviewer Guidelines

Reviewers are responsible for suggesting acceptance, rejection or approval with modifications to the refereed article. Authors and reviewers are kept anonymous during the evaluation process.

Reviewers are required to explicitly state, in the evaluation format, that they do not have any conflict of interests regarding the authors and the topics that they will review. In case of any doubt, the reviewer will be replaced.