About the Journal

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica journal is the successor of Estudios de la Vida Local journal, a publication started by the Institute of Local Administration Studies in 1942. It has therefore exceeded 50 years of uninterrupted existence. It is a publication of a legal-administrative nature, fundamentally dedicated to the analysis and dissemination of the legal aspects of the Local Administration.

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica is a digital biannual publication, with two issues per year that cover the periods April-September and October-March, published the first week of each period (April-October).

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica accepts for review and possible publication articles, brief estudies, communications, jurisprudencial comments and book reviews.

The journal will only review original content in Spanish and English, previously unpublished, and following the guidelines accepted by the scientific community. This publication meets the usual criteria of the scientific publications with the greatest international impact. The articles are subjected to a rigorous review process by the double-blind evaluation method according to the Open Journal System protocol.

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica believes in the free dissemination of scientific knowledge and, therefore, is linked to open access information policies. All Authors should transfer the rights of articles published in this journal to be disseminated in an open format, ensuring that they are not committed to third parties.

The information, concepts, articles and opinions published in this journal do not necessarily reflect the position of this or the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública. Likewise, it does not have editorial control over the content, information and / or material generated and / or provided by third parties that is included in the articles published in the journal, the author / co-author assume assume all responsibility for what is published.

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica is published by Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública, under the Ministerio de Política Territorial y Función Pública and is financed exclusively from the budget of the publishing organization.

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica is indexed in the following evaluation systems, directories and contents, summaries and citations databases:

• FECYT. Sello de Calidad de Revistas Científicas Españolas

Evaluation systems, impact factor and citation indexes:

• REDALYC
• MIAR
• Latindex
• ÍnDICEs CSIC
• CARHUS Plus (CARHUS+)
• ERIHPLUS
• CIRC
• RESH
• DICE
• Actualidad Iberoamericana

Academic search engines:

• GoogleScholar
• Dimensions

Specialized databases:

• VLex
• Social Science Premium Collection (PROQUEST)
• Open Science Directory (EBSCO)
• Zeitschriften Datenbank (ZDB)

Multidisciplinary databases:

• Fuente Academica Plus (EBSCO)
• ProQuest Central
• ProQuest Central Essentials
• ProQuest Central Student

Database summaries and journal systems:

• DIALNET
• REDIB

Journal directories:

• DOAJ (Directory of Open Journal System)
• Journals For Free
• CAPES Portal de Periódicos (CAPES/MEC)

Academic social media and reference managers:

• ACADEMIA.edu
• Mendeley

Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving:

• Dulcinea
• SHERPA/RoMEO

Library catalogues:

• OCLC WorldCAT
• COPAC [catálogo bibliotecario nacional, académico y especializado, JISC]

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica undertakes to publish the papers approved in the peer review process within a maximum of 4 months from the date of the original submission.

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica adopts the ethical standards of the Commitee on Publication Ethics. There of the following guidelines are followed:

• Authors undertake to respect the empirical evidence and not modify the original data to verify or refute the hypothesis. They admit that the work submitted is original and acknowledge the authorship of the sources used 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 work or journal while it is under evaluation in the Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica, undertaking in any case to immediately inform the journal's management of any plans to publish the text, and expressly citing the journal in the new project.
• The authors undertake to include in the article all those researchers who have contributed to the study.
• Reviewers will carry its function only if they considered self-competent on subject that they are intended to assess. Once accepted, they will conduct an objective, technical and constructive evaluation of the article, research note or book review. They undertake to respect the time limits and follow the journal guidelines of in their work.
• Publishers are committed to maintain anonymity throughout the editorial process, which have overall responsibility. They will ensure the intellectual integrity of the process. They will try to avoid any conflicts of interest. 
• La Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica somete los textos publicados a una revisión antiplagio a través del programa Turnitin con el fin de garantizar su originalidad.

This journal provide immediate free and open access to his content in compliance with INAP’s  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 National Institute of Public Administration on its platform.

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica is financed exclusively by the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública, dependent on the Ministerio de Hacienda y Función Pública of the Spain Government.

The Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública 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 Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica 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/REALA/gateway/lockss) (https://revistasonline.inap.es/index.php/REALA/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 Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica, 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, the Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica allows that the author can archive post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing) or publisher's version/PDF. Consequently, the Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica is a RoMEO blue journal.

Available formats of INAP journals (archive)

The journal of the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica is currently published entirely in its electronic version (since No. 310, 2009). For the sake of greater content dissemination and broad 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, independently of the software, hardware or operating system. Invented by Adobe, nowadays PDF is an open and oficial standard recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). PDF is considered the main format of the journal and on should be observed the pertinence and concordance of the content with the author’s final versión, in case of textual conflict with the 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 Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública journals have maintained and continued the original structure of the old printed version. 

HTML

Acronym for Hyper-Text Markup Language is one of the most popular markup languages, the foundation of the web application and development system. It is a standard in the charge of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), facilitating the development of web pages compatible with different browsers and platforms. The articles of the 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 viewing and consulting online from the OJS platform, without the need to download complementary files.

EPUB

EPUB or ePUB (acronym of Electronic publication) is a format of standard document oriented to its downloading and viewing offline in electronic book reader devices (e-readers). Its main advantage is the liquid format adaptable to any reading device (independently of the screen sizes and fonts). The EPUB files published by the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública journals (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 that specification.

XML (JATS)

The JATS standard (Journal Article Tag Suite) is an XML document definition scheme, promoted by the National Information Standars 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. Its use allows the use as a standardized option for the management of the publication processes of scientific journals, the exchange of information, the generation of 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 that uses the JATS standard and can be used as a backup file, since it contains pure text without style, which can be visualized with the support of a style sheet generated independently.

The articles of the journal are distributed in XML-JATS format as an alternative format on the journal's website for free download and use under the specified license. In addition, they are included since 2016 in the journal portal REDALYC, which uses the format for content multicasting. 

The Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica incorporates interoperability protocols that allow it to be collected by other distribution systems. So, it includes Dublin Core metatags, both on the journal's home page 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 objective of developing standards to facilitate interoperability of content on the Internet, allowing metadata to be collected in a much simpler and more efficient way.

The interoperability protocol can be consulted at: OAI-PMH REALA.

Currently edited by the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública, the Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica (REALA) was named Revista de Estudios de la Vida Local (REVL) between 1942 and 1984, dependent on the Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local (that it was created in 1940), being bimonthly between 1942 and 1967 (from no. 157, in 1968, the journal will have a quarterly periodicity).

Between 1985-2000, the journal changed its name to Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica, with ISSN 0213-4675. It was justified by the adaptation to the political and legal reality produced by the new territorial organization of the State (which changed from a centralist model to a decentralized one), tried to gathering autonomous and local levels in a single scientific journal. Already from no. 237, from the period January-March 1988, the journal will become dependent on the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública –this Institute, Instituto de Estudios de la Administración Local, was merged with Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (old named Escuela Nacional de Administración Pública) in 1987 by Real Decreto 221/1987, becoming a single and autonomous organization after Real Decreto 1437/1987-, within the Ministerio para las Administraciones Públicas. Since 1990, the journal periodicity will change again to a four-monthly.

Between the years 2001 and 2003, the journal recovers the meaning of its old name, now entitled as Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local (REAL), with ISSN 1578-4568, since its content will be belonged in the local perspective, separating from the scope of the Autonomous Communities’ Administrations, which will be treated between 2002 and 2003 biannual and for only four issues in a newly created journal, the Revista de Estudios Autonómicos (REA), also dependent on the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública.

After the short time and prior to his new era, the journal resumed the initial header between 2004 and 2011: Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica, with ISSN 1699-7476 (printed format) and ISSN 1989-8975 (electronic format, since 2009, on no. 310), getting back the academic work on the Autonomous Administration and the relations of the local governments and the Spanish Autonomous Communities. During this time the project of digitization of the historical series of the journal began, from the first number until the 295 (January-August 2004).

During the years 2012-2013 the Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica wasn’t published, and it resumed its activity in 2014 starting the current era, with ISSN 1989-8975, taking new numeration and modifying its name by Revista de Estudios de la Administración Local y Autonómica (Nueva época).