About the Journal

Focus and Scope

Semata is an annually and interdisciplinary journal. Every issue includes a dossier about different areas of social and human sciences, as well as a miscellanous section and book reviews.

Peer Review Process

Manuscripts are welcome on every thematic area covered by the aims of the journal. Articles submitted must conform to the editorial rules, and cannot being under consideration by another journal. Texts in the Galician, Portuguese and Spanish language are accepted.

Proposed articles will be subjected to a double blind peer-review process by external experts appointed by the editorial board. The editorial board will take the final decision about the acceptance of the manuscripts, based on the confidential reports sent by the reviewers.

Authors will be informed by e-mail of the full acceptance, provisional acceptance or rejection of their manuscripts, as the case may be, no later than four months after receiving the article. Copies of the peer-reviews will be enclosed.

Authors are expected to make the required changes within no later than one month after reception of the editorial board’s answer. A revised text incorporating the changes should be e-mailed to the secretary of the journal. Within two weeks after meeting the final decision, the Editorial Board will notice the authors its final decision on the proposed manuscript.

Publication Frequency

Annual

Open Access Policy

Sémata has open access to its full-text content.

Obviously, publication is free of charge.

Indexed/abstracted in

The journal is indexed in PASCAL, Fuente Académica Plus, CIRBIC, DIALNET, DICE, LATINDEX, ISOC, Modernitas Citas, REBIUN, RESH, Ulrich’s Directory, MIAR and REDIB.
Impact factor for Humanities journals: 4.380 (MIAR); international dissemination (DICE): 10.5%, ANEP category: B, and LATINDEX standards: 32/33.

Disclaimer and exclusion of liability

Sémata is not responsible for the contents of any article. Publishing an article does not necessarily entail its agreement on the theses presented in it. The editor is free of any responsibility resulting from the author’s eventual violation of intellectual property rights

Review criteria

Comments about content

  1. Scientific interest (emerging or original issues, etc.)
  2. Methodology and resources
  3. Bibliography
  4. Main contributions
  5. Part of the work is not necessary and it could be removed ?

Comments about form

  1. Written style
  2. Index, contents

Presentation of the review

Peer-reviewers will fill in the form enclosed to these instructions. The reviewer’s comments should relate to the decision about whether the article should be published. They are expected to state whether the article deserves to be:
  • Accepted
  • Accepted with changes
  • Rejected

Review form

Ethical Guidelines

Publication of scientific articles involves several actors, including the publisher, the editors in chief, the reviewers and the authors. It is expected that each of these agents have an ethical behaviour referred to ethical principles partially inspired in those provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines.

Publisher:

The publisher provides technical assistance and support to the journal editors in the use of the web platform. It also keeps the software updated, in order to facilitate the submission, evaluation and publication process of scientific works. The publisher also collaborates with the editors in chief indexing the papers, providing information about the databases

requirements and, so, contributing to the Journal positioning in the usual rankings. Broadly, the publisher should helps to increase the editorial quality of the Journal, contributing to its visibility, internationalization and impact.

Editors in chief:

Chief editors ensure that manuscripts submitted are evaluated based exclusively on its intellectual content, regardless of the authors’ race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political affiliation or philosophical trend. They guarantee the confidentiality of the work, not revealing the identity of the authors to other agents except to those authorized by the publisher, the potential reviewers, the actual reviewers or the editorial board of the journal.

Editors are entitled to directly reject a proposal if considered not suited for the guidelines and scope of the journal. They will also notify authors on the acceptance or rejection of their submitted manuscript within the established deadlines.

Reviewers:

Reviewers should decline appraising a manuscript if they do not feel qualified in the subject approached or if they can not take the evaluation within the deadline suggested by the Journal. The peer-review report should be written clearly and based on objective criteria. They should avoid ad hominem, offensive or demeaning comments. Their suggestions should focus mainly on the improvement work. Reviewers should treat manuscripts as confidential documents. Reviewers should decline their role if there is any conflict of interest, such as a past or present relationship with the paper's authors or the institutions they depend.

Authors:

Authors should submit papers based on original and unpublished research, and not being under consideration by another journal. No substantial part of their article should be already published elsewhere. Plagiarism is an unacceptable behaviour, and its detection involves cancel the submission or remove it from the platform if already published. Authors should communicate any conflict of interest potentially emerging between the paper findings and the financial support.

These guidelines are consistent with the ethical code of Santiago de Compostela, institution to which this Journal belongs.

https://www.usc.es/gl/goberno/valedor/codigoetico/CodigoEtico.html

Digital preservation policy

This journal develops various processes in order to preserve permanent access to digital objects hosted on its own servers:

- Backups.
- Monitoring of the technological environment to foresee possible migrations of obsolete formats or software.
- Digital preservation metadata.
- Use of DOI.

The files published on this website are available in easily reproducible formats (PDF)

Anti-plagiarism Policy

This journal is a member of Similarity Check, a multi-publisher initiative started by Crossref to screen published and submitted content for originality.

Through Similarity Check, we use the iThenticate software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted or published manuscripts.

By depositing all of our content in the Similarity Check database we allow other Similarity Check members to screen their submissions against our published articles.

Sponsors

  • Facultade de Xeografía e Historia. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Journal History

Semata was founded in 1988 and nowadays we have published 23 volums.