About the magazine

Opuntia Brava magazine was founded in 2009 by a collective of teachers and researchers from the then Pepito Tey Institute of Pedagogical Sciences, with the purpose of disseminating research results in the field of Pedagogical Sciences. Committed to the history of their locality and to pay proper tribute to it, they decided that the magazine should bear its name, since the plant that once overflowed the city and for which it was given its title was the wild prickly pear or Opuntia, as it is known in Latin. Thus, Opuntia Brava was born, a magazine that aims to be a symbol of love, dedication, resilience, courage, and development.

In 2015, as part of the process of integrating universities in Cuba, the magazine and its team were moved to the Vladimir Ilich Lenin University in Las Tunas. Thus emerged a new university, offering a wider range of degree programs for the Las Tunas region, called the University of Las Tunas. In line with this transformation, the EdacunOb Publishing Group was created, bringing together Edacun, for the publication of electronic books across all sciences, and Opuntia Brava (OB), for the publication of scientific articles on educational sciences.

By coexisting in the same academic context, researchers from various fields of knowledge (based on the variety of programs that make up the institution, beyond the educational sciences) prompted the request to broaden the scope of the journal Opuntia Brava towards multidisciplinarity. This is intended to give the entire university scientific community the opportunity to submit their scientific results and, once approved, to share them through the journal. For this reason, in 2018, Opuntia Brava changed its pedagogical focus to become multidisciplinary.

Starting in 2018, the journal expanded its publication perspective both within the university and the Tunero region, as well as externally. Hence, it became necessary to create a template for arranging the articles and to publish special issues that would allow the scientific community to benefit from the richness of its editorial content.

These elements distinguished its operation until 2024, when the Editorial Board of the journal decided to make changes to the structure of articles to be published, in line with the requirements of high-impact international databases for future submissions. For this reason, the single template that had been used until then was discontinued, and two new templates were introduced: one for reviews and one for original articles, from which the two current publication sections of its issues were created. Whether using one template or the two more recent ones, the content published by the journal over time has been 100% scientific; no other types of articles such as essays, chronicles, reviews, or socio-cultural announcements have been included.

Opuntia Brava is an open-access magazine, which allows it to disseminate information without restrictions for the public interested in it, regardless of cost, academic or social level, or geographic area; it only emphasizes that the authorship of each article must be respected and credit must be given to the magazine as the publishing body where the work is published for the first time. Currently, it adheres to the Diamond Open Access declaration.

Publishes its content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International) license. This license allows sharing and redistributing the work, not for commercial purposes (NC), without derivatives (remixing, transforming, or creating from the material without distributing the modified material to create derivative works (ND), only distributable with attribution to the author. It allows sharing (copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format). Furthermore, it allows consultation and use as long as the authorship of the original creation is respected, as reflected in citations and references.

As its main and unwavering goal, the electronic journal Opuntia Brava seeks to achieve a high level of scientific quality, without compromising clarity of exposition, in order to enhance communication among the different thematic lines that make up the various areas of knowledge it values. This quality aims to be ensured through:

• A Scientific Committee, composed of researchers of national and international renown.
• A careful evaluation of the articles through a peer-review system, using the double-blind modality. In this process, reviewers are required to pay special attention to the relationship of the title with the problem, objective, and content; to the abstract, which should display the objective, main methods and techniques employed, preliminary results to highlight; the structure of the article, according to the chosen template; the length of the article (no less than 10 pages); the timeliness and relevance of the researched problem; the depth of the analysis, scientific positioning, and novelty; the validity of the conclusions; the bibliographic references according to APA7 standards; and the currency of the sources consulted.
• The constant improvement of editorial management, according to contemporary demands for the development of science, its visibility and impact, and editorial activity, in line with technological advances.