Submissions

Author Guidelines

The electronic journal Opuntia Brava is a scientific publication of the University of Las Tunas, Cuba. Its main mission is to disseminate scientific research results conducted in Cuba, Ibero-America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, which contribute to the development of science and society in general. To this end, it publishes review and original articles, in Spanish and English, related to analyses or debates on contemporary theories, social facts, current discussions, and case studies that enrich and offer a new theoretical perspective to various disciplines, particularly in the fields of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Natural and Exact Sciences, Medical and Health Sciences, and Technical and Agricultural Sciences.

For your submission to the magazine, you must meet the following general guidelines and specific requirements.

General Guidelines

1. Articles submitted for possible publication should be predominantly scientific in nature, in accordance with the scope of the journal. Journalistic articles or general commentary on any topic will not be accepted. They must be original (unique) and not previously published, nor under simultaneous review by another editorial body.
2. The journal does not charge (no APC) for the receipt, processing, or publication of an article; this is a free process aimed solely at the scientific development of society.
3. The journal provides two templates (review article template, original article template ) for preparing articles; authors can choose one according to the specifics of their submission.
4. The maximum number of authors for an article is five.
5. The article's cover page must include the full name of the author(s) and their role (primary author, co-author, or contributor), as well as their email address and ORCID registration or code, information that is mandatory.
6. The submission of an article does not imply its acceptance for publication; it must follow a staged review process, detailed at the following link (Editorial policy and management | Opuntia Brava).
7. Articles that receive a favorable initial editorial judgment proceed to a peer review process, conducted in a double-blind format, by two members of the journal's reviewer pool, which consists of distinguished academics from national and international institutions, always external to the authors' affiliated institutions. The decisions or judgments from this process are:

• Accept submission (approved for publication without changes).
• Revisions required (approved for publication once minor corrections are made).
• Resubmit for review (subject to mandatory changes and a new evaluation).
• Redirect to another site (when it does not match the journal's profile).
• Reject submission. See comments (a file with broader criteria is attached).

8. The acceptance of an article is carried out after it has received at least two favorable reviews (the first three resolutions of point 7 are considered), in the peer review process.
9. Discrepant results in a review process will entail sending the article to a third reviewer, whose review will be final in deciding whether or not to accept an article for publication.
10. Reviews are final and cannot be appealed. Reviewers have up to thirty (30) days to issue them.
11. Reviewers must examine the changes made in cases of results subject to re-submission. The limit of re-submissions for an article is three times; after that, the article is rejected for exceeding the limit.
12. The author or authors have thirty (30) calendar days to make corrections at each stage of the evaluation process (Editorial policy and management | Opuntia Brava).
13. Articles must not exceed 30% content similarity (plagiarism) with any other previously published document; this is verified with specialized software, both at the beginning and at the end of processing.
14. Evaluation processes are determined by the number of articles on the waiting list. Authors can track the progress of their work in the review and editing process through the website.
15. The Editorial Committee may perform style corrections and make editorial changes it deems necessary to improve the article, without altering its content.
16. The Editorial Committee will resolve any unforeseen cases.
17. The issues of the journal will include the number of articles determined by the Editorial Committee, based on those that, at the time of editorial closing, have the approval of at least two reviewers. For better thematic composition, Opuntia Brava reserves the right to postpone accepted articles.
18. Authors may use the material from their article in other works or texts published by them, provided that they cite the journal Opuntia Brava as the original source.
19. The journal publishes its content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International) license, which allows sharing and redistributing the work, but not using it for commercial purposes (NC), without derivatives (remixing, transforming, or creating from the material), and without distributing modified material to create derivative works (ND), only distributable with author attribution. It allows sharing (copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format), as well as consultation and use, as long as the authorship of the original creation is respected, as recognized in citations and references.

Specific requirements for the assembly of articles to be submitted for publication1

1. Authors may choose one of the two templates offered by the journal for proposal submission and assemble their article in full compliance with it. In this way, they can create a review article or an original article.
2. The structure of the review article should follow: introduction (which clearly reflects the background of the research and the purpose of the article), development (organized by headings), and conclusions (which demonstrate the achievement of the intended objective).
3. The structure of the original article should follow: introduction (which clearly reflects the background of the research and the purpose of the article), materials and methods, results (organized by headings), discussion, and conclusions (which demonstrate the achievement of the intended objective).

1. The articles should be between 10 to 20 pages in length (including graphics, tables, footnotes, and bibliography), in letter size, single-spaced, 6.0 points between paragraphs, in Arial 12.0 font, with an initial capital letter and top, bottom, inner, and outer margins of 2.5 cm.
2.  The author(s) must include, at the end of the first page, in a footnote, a brief curriculum vitae containing the following elements: highest academic and/or scientific degree, academic and/or scientific rank, institution and department where they work, and country.
3. The author(s) must include, at the end of the document, a statement regarding conflicts of interest or the absence thereof.7. The author(s) must declare authorship contributions, indicating clearly what each author contributed to the creation of the manuscript.8. The title should reveal the semantic key of the text.
4. The author or authors must declare the authorship contributions, making it clear what each author contributed to the creation of the proposal.
5. The title must reveal the semantic key of the text.
6.  The abstract must contain concise information about the content (main results, methods, and conclusions); it should not exceed 250 words (in Spanish and English).
7.  The keywords of the text must be between three and five (in Spanish and English) and separated by commas.
8.  Footnotes should be placed at the bottom of the page and not at the end of the article, in Times New Roman 10-point font. They should be purely explanatory or clarifying, that is, they should serve to expand or illustrate what is stated in the body of the text and not to indicate bibliographic sources, which are listed in the final references.
9. The illustrations (maps, charts, tables, graphs, and photos) should be strictly necessary and must be self-explanatory, without requiring reference to the text for understanding; they should be placed at the point where they are mentioned in the text. They cannot EXCEED a WIDTH of 12.5 cm and a LENGTH of 18.6 cm. The journal, due to editorial policy, reserves the right not to publish illustrations that are too large.
10.  The final list of bibliographic references will include the works of the authors cited in the body of the text, without adding those not cited, and self-citations should not exceed 30% of the total. They will be arranged according to APA7 guidelines, alphabetically and chronologically, as appropriate.
11.  Articles must be submitted to the journal in WORD format, through the journal's platform, in the submissions tab (Submissions | Opuntia Brava). If this is not accessible, they can be sent via the journal's email revistaopuntiabrava@gmail.com.

In case of any doubts or situations of any kind that may arise, the authors can contact the journal's Editorial Committee through the following means:

revistaopuntiabrava@gmail.com

miriamvm@ult.edu.cu

egutierrez@ult.edu.cu

• Phone 31 374539
• Universidad de Las Tunas.
  Avenida Carlos Juan Finlay S/N. Reparto Santos. Las Tunas. Cuba.