About the Journal

The Documentación Administrativa (Administrative Documentation) Review is, among the periodical publications in this speciality, an inescapable benchmark in the doctrinal construction of Spanish Administrative Law and Administration Science. Founded in 1958, its hallmark throughout its more than a half-century of life has consisted in being a publication devoted to reflecting on the administration, the administrative reform, administrative organisation and the public function through the conduit of administration law and science.

In 2020 a new era begins, oriented to the legal regime treatment and the staff's issues at the State service. The projected contribution is to offer reflections on the present and future of public employment, key institution of good administration. Finally, we the people are responsible of the correct fulfilment of the organizations’ tasks, in such way that each elements of the public servants’ Statute matters to the citizenship.

Nacida en 1958 con el nombre de Revista de Documentación Administrativa, a partir del año 2014, la Revista inició una nueva etapa, denominada ahora Documentación Administrativa, que llega a nuestros días.

The journal guarantees that the maximum review time for an article is two months.

1. Authors must consult the guidelines for submissions before sending a publication proposal. The submission will be accompanied by a brief note highlighting the contribution that the text has made to the discipline and guaranteeing the originality of the article, as well as the fact that it is not under review in another journal.

2. If the text in case meets all the formal requirements, the author will be informed and the evaluation process will begin.

3. Articles received are subject to an initial review by the Documentación Administrativa Editorial Board, which will assess the quality and thematic adequacy of the work and may be directly rejected without undergoing an external review. The Editorial Board may require the assistance of members of the Advisory Board, if deemed necessary.

4. If the article overcomes this first filter, a "double blind" review process begins, in which neither the authors nor the reviewers know the identity of the other party. Articles will be sent to two external reviewers, specialists in the field or line of research, together with the article review form. In the case that the evaluations differ, or for any other reason, the Editorial Board may send the text to a third reviewer.

5. In view of the reports of the reviewers, the Editorial Board may adopt one of the following decisions that will be communicated to the author(s):

• Publishable as it is (or with minor revisions).
• Publishable after revision. In this case, publication will depend on the realization by the author(s) of all the changes required by the editors. The deadline for making these changes will be two months. The author must attach a brief report explaining the changes introduced and how they comply with the requirements of the Editorial Board. Among the proposed changes may be the adaptation of the article to another section.
• Not publishable, but with the possibility of rewriting and resending the article. In this case, the resubmission of a new version will not imply any guarantee of publication; rather, the evaluation process will start again from the beginning.
• Not publishable.

6. Documentación Administrativa will publish annually the list of all the people who have conducted anonymous evaluations. 

7. If it is led to discover any of them, Documentación Administrativa may make public any of the following scientific malpractices: plagiarism, falsification or invention of data, individual appropriation of collective authorship and duplicate publication.

Documentación Administrativa undertakes to publish the papers approved in the peer review process within a maximum of 4 months from the date of the original submission.

Documentación Administrativa adopts the ethical standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics which have the following implications:

• Authors are committed to respecting the empirical evidence and not modifying the original data to verify or refute the initial hypotheses. They accept that the articles submitted are original and acknowledge the authorship of the sources they use in the study.
• By submitting the article, the author declares that the essential content of the article has not been published and will not be published in any other publication or journal while it is being evaluated in the DA journal. In the case that there is another publication project of this text, the author commits to inform the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública management about it immediately, citing the journal in the new project.
• Authors commit to include in the article the identity of all the researchers who have contributed to the realization of the study.
• Reviewers will only perform their function if they are considered competent in the subject matter proposed for evaluation. They must carry out an objective, technical and constructive review of the article, research note or review. They undertake to respect the time limits and to follow the guidelines of the journal in their work.
• Editors are committed to maintaining anonymity throughout the editorial process, a matter for which they are ultimately responsible. They will ensure the intellectual integrity of the process. They will avoid any kind of conflict of interest.
• DA submits the texts received for anti-plagiarism review through the Turnitin program in order to guarantee their originality.

Documentación Administrativa distributes its contents in different repositories.

This journal provide immediate free and open access to his content in compliance with Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública  aim “to promote research, reflection and debate, as well as to generate and disseminate open knowledge on public Administration and public value”.

This journal also adhere to the Open Access (OA) journal movement and submit their entire contents to various national and international indexes, repositories and databases under this protocol. Therefore, the submission of a paper for publication in this journal presupposes the explicit acceptance by the author of this method of distribution.

Assignment of rights and Creative Commons licence

Authors who publish in this journal will retain their copyright, but will grant it the right of first publication of their work, which will simultaneously be subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence, which allows third parties to share the content and to remix, adapt and create from it in any medium or format provided that the original creator is cited and only for non-commercial purposes.

Without prejudice to the assignment made, the author maintains the right to self-archive the author's final version after peer review or the editor's final version in any of its formats in open access institutional repositories and self-archiving platforms, and will always provide the link to the document published by the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública on its platform.

Documentación Administrativa is financed exclusively by the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública, dependent on the Ministerio de Hacienda y Función Pública of the Spain Government.

Documentación Administrativa does not charge the authors any charges for publication (APCs) or for any other concept.

Authors are responsible for guaranteeing that the information contained in their work is original and has not been copied, invented, distorted or manipulated, as well as the consensus in the case of shared authorship.  Plagiarism in any form is considered unethical and will be grounds for initial rejection or immediate withdrawal of those published texts in which it is detected.

Texts received by the journal Documentación Administrativa may be subjected to a similarity check using the Turnitin application in order to guarantee their originality.

Rejection on the grounds of originality will be communicated to the authors together with the Turnitin report. There is no maximum percentage of similarity, the editors will decide on possible rejections in the light of the analysis of the report.

Only those papers that are finally published will be deposited in the Turnitin database to allow other editors to analyse the originality of their texts under evaluation. Submission of an article to the journal implies acceptance of the deposit when it is published.

Preservation

PKP Preservation Network (PN). This journal uses the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) to digitally preserve the numbers published since the first issue of the new era. Each new published number is automatically transferred, being archived once it is validated. The numbers of the historical collection are also being incorporated, as they can be revised. PKP offers perpetual access without interruptions and preservation of the authentic original version of the content.

LOCKSS & CLOCKSS. The journal also uses OJS support for LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), developed by the Stanford University Library, to license storage and distribution of the journal in partner libraries (https://revistasonline.inap.es/index.php/DA/gateway/lockss) (https://revistasonline.inap.es/index.php/DA/gateway/clockss).

The Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública, an agency under the authority of the Ministerio de Política Territorial y Función Pública, is the depository and maintains the archive of the Documentación Administrativa journal, and preserves the archives in accordance with the current legislation for the preservation of information in the field of Spanish Public Administration, in accordance with Article 21 (Application of Information and Communication Technologies in the management and processing of documents, "Aplicación de las tecnologías de la información y comunicaciones en la gestión y tratamiento de los documentos"), of Real Decreto 1708/2011, de 18 de noviembre, por el que se establece el Sistema Español de Archivos y se regula el Sistema de Archivos de la Administración General del Estado y de sus Organismos Públicos y su régimen de acceso. Section C under Article 21 states that the Ministerial Departments and their related or dependent agencies will provide the application of the basic principles and minimum requirements required for appropriate protection of information in order to ensure access, integrity, availability, authenticity, confidentiality, traceability and preservation of the data, information and services used in electronic media that they manage in the exercise of their competences.

Archiving

Regarding self-archiving policies, Documentación Administrativa allows that the author can archive post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing) or publisher's version/PDF. Consequently, Documentación Administrativa can be considered a RoMEO blue journal. Documentación Administrativa has applied for inclusion in the MELIBEA and SHERPA/ROMEO directories, declaring its self-archiving policy, and is awaiting inclusion in both.

File formats

Documentación Administrativa is now published in electronic form - from issue no. 3 of the new era. For broader dissemination of content and wide compatibility with reading devices, it is currently distributed in the following formats:

PDF

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to present and exchange documents reliably, regardless of software, hardware or operating system. Developed by Adobe, nowadays PDF is an open and official standard recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is considered the main file format of the journal and in which the relevance and concordance of the content with the author's final version must be observed, in case of textual conflict with other available formats (HTML, EPUB, XML-JATS). All the contents (articles and the list of authors) and the complete number can be consulted in PDF. The PDFs of the INAP journals have maintained and continued the original structure of the old printed version.

HTML

HTML is the acronym for Hyper-Text Markup Language, which is the basis of web content and application development. It is a standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that facilitates the development of web pages that are compatible with different browsers and platforms. The articles of Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública journals published in HTML maintain the structure and style of the PDF version of which they are an alternative format. The HTML format is designed for online viewing from the OJS platform, without the need to download additional files.

EPUB

EPUB (acronym for Electronic publication) is a document format for downloading and offline viewing on e-reader devices. Its main advantage is the liquid format that can be adapted to any reading device (regardless of screen sizes and fonts). The EPUB files published by Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública magazines (EPUB 2.0), are valid and conform to the standards defined by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which guarantees their reproduction in devices conforming to this specification.

XML (JATS)

The JATS standard (Journal Article Tag Suite) is an XML document definition scheme, promoted by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), to describe structure, semantics and metadata related to graphic and text content of journal articles. It is an open standard widely used by academic publishers, open access projects of scientific journals, libraries and archives around the world. It can be used as a standardized option for managing scientific journal publication processes, exchanging information, generating other products from XML, and the digital preservation of the content of the journals (in repositories or databases). It guarantees compatibility with any publishing system using the JATS standard and can be used as a backup file, because it contains only pure text without style, which can be viewed with the support of an independently generated style sheet.

Journal articles are distributed in XML-JATS format as an alternative format on the journal's website for free download and use under the specified license.

Documentación Administrativa incorporates interoperability protocols that allow it to be collected by other distribution systems. Thus, it includes Dublin Core meta-tags, both on the homepage of the magazine and in the articles.

OAI-PMH

Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a protocol used for the transmission of metadata on the Internet.

OAI-PMH was created with the aim of developing standards to facilitate the interoperability of content on the Internet allowing metadata to be collected in a much simpler and more efficient way.

The interoperability protocol can be found at: OAI-PMH DA.