About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra journal aims to stimulate scientific discussion on geoscientific knowledge, resource use, and its constraints.The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra is a peer-reviewed journal that regularly publishes research papers, case studies, short communications, and reviews.

The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra journal is published biannually and provides immediate open access to its content under the principle of making research freely available to the public, which favors a greater exchange of global knowledge.

Articles with the following characteristics will NOT be considered for publication:

  • Previously published in another journal or scientific/informative magazine.
  • Translations of previously published works.
  • Manuscripts using material protected by intellectual property rights.
  • States of the art of engineering subjects that do not contribute to innovation in the field of knowledge.
  • Manuscripts that come from class notes.
  • Manuscripts that are offensive to individuals, research groups, products, and/or other services.

Authors do not pay Article Processing Charges (APC) at any time. All costs for the submission and review processes, as well as other publishing functions, are free.

 

Publication Frequency

The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra journal is published every six months, with issues in June and December.

The call for articles for possible publication is permanent.

 

Submission Process

Any submitted article must be accompanied by a Cover Letter, requesting its publication in the Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra journal and indicating that all authors have approved the manuscript and agree with its submission. Authors must also confirm that neither the manuscript nor any part of its contents is being considered or published in another journal.

During the submission process, authors should suggest four potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript. When suggesting potential reviewers, authors should not suggest reviewers who have a personal or professional connection to the authors or co-authors if such connection could bias the judgment of the manuscript. Authors may suggest reviewers from among the authors that they frequently cite in their work.

Articles submission to this journal is entirely online. Authors must register as users on the Open Journal System (OJS) (OJS) website and submit their articles through this platform.
Authors must structure their articles according to the journal's guidelines, which are in the Article Submission Template. This document includes extensions, citation rules, etc. When uploading the manuscript, it should be in Microsoft Word® (NOT .zip or another compressed file) suitable for blind review (without informing the authors).

Once the Article, Cover Letter, and Registration Form have been submitted correctly through the OJS, the system will send an acknowledgment of receipt to the author registered on the OJS. All communication regarding the article and the processing of supplementary material will be carried out through the registered e-mail of the article's main author.

If the article is accepted for publication, the authors must read carefully and entirely the Letter of Assignment of Patrimonial Rights in favor of the Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra, which must be signed by all authors and submitted at the time of approval of the final version for publication. Once the article has been accepted for publication, the authors must give their consent to serve as reviewers of other manuscripts in their area of knowledge, if required.

 

Ethical Guidelines

The publication of a scientific article is an essential part of the dissemination of knowledge in addition, it is evidence of the quality of the research and the authors themselves. Therefore, all the people involved in the publication process of scientific research, editors, authors, and manuscript reviewers should know, follow, and respect a series of ethical guidelines that guarantee the correct development of the process of knowledge dissemination.

The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra is committed to:

As mentioned before, the value of academic publishing relies on everyone involved behaving ethically. The following points are only intended to give a broad overview and are not exhaustive.

Ethical duties of authors

  • An author is a person who has made a significant scientific contribution to the work reported. It is necessary to ensure that all individuals credited as authors participated in the actual authorship of the work and that all who participated are credited and have given consent for publication. The order of the author list must be a joint decision of the co-authors, and all of them share responsibility and accountability for the results.
  • Authors must disclose to the editor and readers of the journal any relevant actual or potential conflicts of interest of any of the authors that might be associated with the publication of the results contained in the manuscript at the time of submission (this would include funding assistance).
  • Authors are obligated to present an accurate and complete description of the research conducted and identify the source of all information cited or offered except that which is the public domain. Plagiarism is not acceptable. The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra  adheres to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s definition of plagiarism as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving proper credit”. The editorial team will verify the originality of the text for cases of improper citation or possible plagiarism using the Turnitin service (www.turnitin.com).
  • Authors must comply with all research ethics guidelines of their discipline, especially when human or animal subjects are involved.
  • Authors should not engage in any form of overlapping publication (multiple publications), which includes the following cases: self-plagiarism or duplicate publication (unacceptably close replication of the author’s own previously published text or results without acknowledgment of the source), inflated or expanded publication (a new publication obtained by adding new data or cases but with similar conclusions to those of the previous publication), salami publication or fragmentation (research results are divided as many low-quality manuscripts as possible with the aim of maximizing the total number of publications), and redundant publication (several publications are based on the same data). Note that publishing the same research in different languages is a form of duplicate publication because the contributions are the same.
  • Authors must not engage in any form of fraud, which means presenting false data or conclusions that have not been obtained through a rigorous research process.
  • Authors have an obligation to cooperate with the journal in the event of a retraction process. Retraction is an integral part of the scientific communication system and constitutes a public instrument for recording or correcting problems in a published article or communicating its cancellation.

Ethical duties of reviewers

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), journals should provide transparent policies for peer review, and reviewers should conduct reviews ethically and responsibly. Therefore, reviewers should:

  • Accept only manuscript reviews for which they possess the necessary subject matter expertise to conduct an adequate evaluation. A chosen reviewer who feels inadequately qualified to judge the research described in a manuscript should immediately return the manuscript to the editor.
  • Declare all potential competing or conflicting interests that could affect the impartiality of their reviewing and decline to review where appropriate. Competing interests may be personal, financial, intellectual, professional, political, or religious in nature.
  • Being responsible for providing a review in a timely fashion based on the journal’s policy for review. This includes deciding to review the manuscript and completing the review within the requested time frame.
  • Maintain the confidentiality of the review process and do not disclose any details of a manuscript or its review during or after the peer review process. They must also refrain from using information obtained during the peer review process for their benefit or the benefit of any other person or organization.
  • Explain and support their judgments adequately, so editors and authors may understand the basis of their comments.
  • Be objective, fair, impartial, and constructive in their reviews, refraining from being hostile to authors. They should not allow their reviews to be influenced by the origin of a manuscript, by the nationality, religious or political beliefs, gender, or other characteristics of the authors, or by commercial considerations.

Ethical duties of the editor(s)

  • Editors should maintain and promote consistent ethical policies for their journals and monitor and act to enforce those policies as necessary to be fair and consistent.
  • Editors have the responsibility to prudently reject manuscripts without external review. Such rejections may be based on the manuscript not being within the scope of the journal, not being of current interest or sufficiently broad, not providing adequate depth of content, not being written in acceptable English or Spanish, or for other reasons.
  • Editors must have an active role in the case of retraction or concern manifestation of published articles. The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra applies the procedures recommended by SciELO when articles and other types of documents published by journals may contain inaccuracies that have not been detected in the evaluation and editorial process and are revealed after publication.

 

Open Access Policy

The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra journal publishes research articles through the Open Journal Systems (OJS), following the principle of free access to the scientific community and the general public, which has a positive impact on the quality of research results, being also a factor that guarantees equity. In other words, all content is freely available to the user or their institution. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the articles or use them for any other lawful purpose without requesting prior permission from the publisher or the author. Due to the system's characteristics, this tool allows better control of the publication process, thus facilitating communication and dissemination among all those involved.

 

Digital Preservation Policy

The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra journal preserves its digital files (PDF) through cloud storage to preserve them in case of any inconvenience or failure in the OJS system. In addition, the LOCKSS system has been configured as a medium to create an archive that can be distributed among libraries or digital repositories, which creates a backup that allows harvesting of the articles in case their restoration is necessary.

 

Statistics (Google Analytics - Users) (Visits)

 

Journal History

The journal Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra was created in 1976 by the School of Geosciences of the Department of Geosciences and Environment of the Faculty of Mines, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin.

 

Sources of Support

School of Geosciences and Environment, Facultad de Minas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin Campus

 

Reviewer Guidelines

Peer review is a relevant process within the scientific publication that allows and guarantees to a great extent the quality and relevance of the manuscripts submitted for publication. For this reason, it should be done with utmost care and responsibility.

Duties of reviewers:

  • Contribution to the editorial decision
  • Celerity
  • Confidentiality
  • Objectivity
  • Disclosure of conflicts of interest

The evaluation process for articles submitted to the Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra Journal is "double-blind", assigning peer reviewers who are specialists of recognized competence in the subject, in which both reviewers and authors are unaware of their identities. Peer reviewers examine the articles for quality, originality, and relevance and make technical judgments on their possible publication.

After verifying that the subject of the submitted article is within the area of expertise, the reviewers receive the request, and they must confirm whether they accept or decline this responsibility. In this way, the journal can schedule the expected receipt of the review results, or if the reviewer declines, the article can be assigned to another reviewer. Once accepted, the reviewer has one month from the receipt of the article to submit their evaluation of the manuscript in order not to lengthen the selection process too much.

Reviewers must perform their work impartially and confidentially and are free to communicate possible conflicts of interest to complete the evaluation, whether the conflict of interest in reviewing the assigned article is academic, professional, or personal concerning the article they are asked to evaluate.

To carry out the evaluation, the peer reviewers have at their disposal a form that is delivered together with the article (Article Evaluation Format) to facilitate their reading and response on the relevance and possible publication of the article. With the help of the evaluation form, the peer reviewers can submit their opinion according to one of the following alternatives:

  • Recommends the article as submitted.
  • The article can be accepted after minor revisions described in the written evaluation report.
  • The article can be accepted after major revisions described in the written evaluation report.
  • An additional reviewer must evaluate the article before it is accepted.
  • The article is not accepted for publication.

Once the peer review results are received, the journal's Editorial Committee analyzes the responses and, considering the comments of the peer reviewers and the associate editor, makes decisions on the article's publication.

The Editorial Committee of the Journal Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra clarifies that not all the results of the evaluation of an article must coincide in terms of recommendations; therefore, it is the Editorial Committee who, based on all the observations, makes the final decision on whether or not to publish the article.

The journal favors the "double-blind" evaluation system, mainly to guarantee impartiality in the evaluations, and no case will reveal the identity of the authors or the evaluators. Therefore, in cases where it is deemed necessary, the Editorial Committee modifies the evaluation reports to safeguard the peer's identities.

 

Advice for facilitating peer reviews

The Journal Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra summarizes below some issues to be taken into account to help peer reviewers carry out their evaluation in a more agile and adequate manner:

  • The title of must be concise, short, and descriptive of the research or topic to be presented in the text.
  • The abstract and resumen must be consistent in their translation from one language to another; they must clearly describe the study addressed, methods and materials, results, and conclusions.
  • The Boletín de Ciencias de la Tierra expects that the articles to be published will be of interest and validity to the scientific community in the geosciences area; therefore, the main aspect of the evaluated article should be highlighted in the evaluation.
  • For the journal, it is essential to verify the originality and degree of innovation of the text to evaluate, in other words, it is recommended to confirm if the article is an original version and not a repetition or superficial modification of works already published with similar methods and results. A different case is if the article belongs to a continuation of research, in which the new material presented does not coincide in more than 50% with those previously published.
  • Regarding the presented methodology, it is expected that its description be logical and detailed so that it will be easily understandable to any reader. Also, it is relevant that the measurements and results obtained be sufficient and clear in the results expressed in the content.
  • In general, the article's organization should be clear, concise, and reasonable. The language used in the text, which has to be carefully well written, also should be clear and easily understood even by neophytes in the subject. The assumptions of common terms in a specific area should be avoided, and the abbreviations and acronyms should be clearly defined the first time they appear in the text.
  • Verify that the system of units used in the text is the internationally used one; in the case of using equations and calculations, it is desirable to verify these results.
  • Regarding figures and tables, it should be verified if they are necessary for the presentation of the text and if they describe what they present. In addition, they must be referenced correctly in the text.
  • The conclusions must be well structured, and if new suggestions can improve them, it is pertinent for the evaluator to indicate this.

 

On the final answer or concept of the evaluation:

The evaluation results could be delivered according to one of the following alternatives:

  • Recommends publishing the article as submitted: There are no suggestions or modifications regarding the article, and it can be published as submitted. The Editorial Committee will review aspects of form and presentation according to the indications of the Article Submission Format so that the authors hand in their final version.
  • The article can be accepted after minor revisions, as described in the written evaluation report: The peer reviewers deliver fewer suggestions and recommendations, which, if the authors admit them, the Editorial Committee will verify the new corrected version and the aspects of form and presentation to decide on the publication of the article.
  • The article can be accepted after major revisions described in the evaluation written report:  The article is not recommended for publication without first making the major corrections delivered by the peers, which must be analyzed and carried out by the authors; the final corrected version will be sent again to the peers to verify compliance with the suggestions and that they issue their final response.
  • An additional reviewer must evaluate the article before it is accepted: When the initial peer reviews the article but also suggests that it should be reviewed by another peer with a more rigorous knowledge of the subject of the manuscript.
  • The article is not accepted for publication: Based on the evaluation responses, the Editorial Committee decides not to accept the article for publication. This decision is final.