ECiencia considers an author of a published work to be a person who has made a significant and intellectual contribution to it. Following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), to be listed as an author, the following requirements must be met:

• Contributed to the conception and design, data acquisition, or analysis and interpretation of data that resulted in the article.
• Participated in drafting or critically revising the text.
• Approved the final version to be published.

Those who do not meet all three criteria may only be acknowledged in the acknowledgments section. To avoid ghost or usurped authorship, it is recommended that, at the time of submission, all authors agree on their contributions and the order in which they will appear in the co-author list.

To specify each author’s contribution to the work, it is recommended to use the criteria established by the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), which includes roles such as:

• Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• Data Curation: Management and maintenance of research data (including software code, where necessary for interpreting data) for initial use and later reuse.
• Formal Analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques to analyze data.
• Funding Acquisition: Obtaining financial support for the project.
• Investigation: Conducting experiments or collecting data.
• Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the planning and execution of research.
• Writing – Original Draft: Drafting the initial version of the published work.
• Writing – Review & Editing: Critical review and editing of the text.

Each author’s contribution will be detailed at the end of the article in a note titled Author Contribution Statement.

To determine the order of authorship in the article, authors may use any of the following practices:

• First-Last-Author-Emphasis (FLAE): The first and last authors are the most significant, with the order indicating decreasing contributions between them.
• Sequence-Determines-Credit (SDC): The order reflects the importance of the contribution.
• Equal Contribution (EC): Alphabetical order is used to recognize similar contributions or avoid disputes in collaborative groups.

The opinions and facts presented in each article are the sole responsibility of the authors, who must also ensure the ethical appropriateness of the article. Additionally, authors must explicitly state that the text is their own work and that the intellectual property rights of third parties are respected. Authors must ensure they have the necessary permissions to use, reproduce, and publish material that is not their own (tables, graphs, maps, diagrams, photographs, etc.).

By submitting an article, authors confirm that it is original and has not been submitted for consideration or published in any other journal. To avoid name confusion and ensure proper attribution of publications and citations, ECiencia requires an ORCID ID for all authors. While ORCID alone does not guarantee a secure identity, it serves as an additional control against authorship identity fraud.

Changes in Authorship

Any changes to the author list (addition, removal, or reordering of names) must be made before the manuscript is accepted and only with the approval of the journal editor. To request a change, the author must provide the editor with:

• The reason justifying the modification to the author list.
• Written confirmation from all authors agreeing to the addition, removal, or reordering. In the case of an addition or removal, confirmation from the affected author must also be included.

For an accepted manuscript, changes to authorship will only be considered under exceptional circumstances. Publication of the article will be paused while the change request is evaluated. If the manuscript has already been published online, any approved changes will result in a correction note.

Conflict of Interest for Authors

The most common conflicts of interest are financial, such as direct employment, paid consultancies, company shares, honoraria, patents, or lecture fees. However, conflicts may also arise from personal relationships, intellectual rivalries, academic competitions, or beliefs.

When submitting an article for publication, authors are responsible for declaring any financial or personal relationships with public or private entities that could influence the results of their work. They must also declare any non-financial relationships that could cause a conflict of interest in their manuscript (personal, academic, ideological, intellectual, political, or religious).

Both financial and non-financial conflicts of interest must be disclosed at the time of article submission. The goal is not to prevent authors with potential conflicts from publishing but to ensure that such conflicts are clearly identified so readers can assess whether they might influence the work.

A note titled Conflict of Interest will be published at the end of the article. If no conflicts exist, the note will state “None.”