About the Journal

Mission

The mission of the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) is to promote the dissemination of knowledge and strengthen academic debate surrounding the Law of the Sea, emphasizing the perspectives, challenges, and contributions of Latin America and the Caribbean. The journal aims to be an accessible, inclusive, and scientifically excellent platform that encourages the production of original research contributing to legal development both regionally and in dialogue with the global context.

Focus and Scope

With a broad regional scope, the journal publishes original and unpublished works and serves as a platform for:

 

  1. Articles authored by professors, researchers, and professionals specializing in the Law of the Sea from Latin America and the Caribbean, or by any authors who offer a Latin American or Caribbean perspective on global or regional issues.
  2. Discussions that improve understanding of the global development of the Law of the Sea, with implications for Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

Additionally, the journal accepts articles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French (the official languages of the countries in the region) that present critical analyses of legal developments in the law of the sea in Latin America and/or the Caribbean or reflect on the region.

 

LACJLOS emerges to fill a doctrinal gap and stands out as the first journal dedicated exclusively to publishing articles on the law of the sea in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Frequency

The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) adopt the system of continuous publication (rolling pass), making it faster to publish articles as they are approved. There are no issues (numbers) or frequency. This measure minimizes the problem of publication time between acceptance and publication of the article. The complete summary and editorial will be published at the end of the year.

 

Open Access

Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) follows the open access model, offering unrestricted virtual access (including financial limitations) to all its scientific texts.

 

Open access refers to a condition in which the copyright holders of academic articles grants rights of use to third parties using an open license (Creative Commons Attribution, CC-BY), allowing immediate free access to them and authorizing any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link the full text of the article; track them for indexing; or use them as software data or for any other lawful purpose.

 

Open Science Compliance

Ethics in Publication

  1. The intentional inclusion of questionable references to manipulate impact factors or increase the probability of acceptance of the manuscript constitutes an ethically unacceptable practice.
  2. Authors have an ethical responsibility to report any evidence that contradicts their point of view. Moreover, the evidence to support their positions must be methodologically sound.
  3. Authors have an ethical obligation to report all aspects of their research that may be relevant to the independent reproducibility of their research.
  4. Only people who have significantly contributed to the research deserve authorship in manuscripts. Significant contributions include conducting experiments, participating in the elaboration of experimental planning, result analysis, or elaboration of the manuscript. Borrowing equipment, obtaining funding, or general supervision alone fail to justify the inclusion of new authors (who should nevertheless be acknowledged).
  5. Collaboration between professors and students must follow the criteria above. Supervisors should take care the authorship of articles include no students with little or no contribution to them or exclude those with active participation in them. Phantom authorship constitutes an ethically unacceptable practice in science.
  6. All authors are responsible for the veracity and competence of their research. The first and corresponding authors have full responsibility for their articles and the other authors, that of their individual contributions.
  7. Authors must be able to describe their personal contribution to their research if requested.
  8. All research, whether with animals or with human beings, must follow ethical standards.

 

 

EDITORIAL POLICY

The Journal Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS), published by the Brazilian Institute for the Law of the Sea (BILOS) and affiliated with the Postgraduate Program in Law at Centro Universitário Dom Helder, aims to publish scientific articles by authors from both domestic and international teaching or research institutions.

  1. Unpublished contributions will be accepted, and the publication of an article is subject to its adequacy to editorial standards. The mere receipt of a manuscript does not imply its publication. Exceptionally, the Editorial Committee may accept the submission of works that have already been published and, if this occurs, they will be submitted to the same peer review process as previously unpublished ones. Authors must submit written authorization from the editor of the journal in which their work was originally published, along with a copy of the article.
  2. The journal reserves the right to make normative, spelling and grammatical changes to the originals, with a view to maintaining the cultured standard of the language, respecting, however, the authors' style.
  3. Articles published in the journal Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) may be reprinted, in whole or in part, as long as the source of the original publication is acknowledged.
  4. The opinions expressed by the authors of the articles are their sole responsibility.

Preprints

  • In line with good Open Science communication practices, Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) that encourage the publication of reliable preprints on the following servers: SciELO Preprints, arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv. The acceptance of preprints from other servers will be reviewed by the journal editors. In these cases, authors must indicate the link to the published version of the article and its DOI, if any. In these cases, the evaluation system changes from double-blind to single blind peer review since the reviewers will know the authors’ identity, but the authors will not know the reviewers’ identity. In such cases, Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) notes that reviewers may have to state a conflict of interest.

Evaluation phases

Articles submitted through the journal’s website will undergo two evaluation phases: the first phase will be carried out by the editorial team and is intended to verify compliance with the Guidelines for Authors available on the journal's website; in case of approval in the first phase, the article will be forwarded to blind peer review, this being the second phase, in which the article can be approved, approved with mandatory revisions, or rejected.

In all cases, the editorial decision and evaluations will be sent by email to the author – in case of co-authorship, to the co-author who registered in the submission as the main contact. In case of approval with mandatory revisions, the author will have 5 working days (period that may eventually be extended, depending on the complexity of the requested revisions) to send the revised version of the article through the journal’s system, which will be reviewed by the editorial team. If the revisions are not satisfactory, new adjustments may be necessary or, as the case may be, the article may be rejected. Failure by authors to respond to requests for revisions may also result in article rejection.

Peer review process

  • Articles will be evaluated by peer review, i.e., they will be subjected to the approval of at least two evaluators with expertise on the addressed topics. The articles will be sent for evaluation without authorship identification. The originals will be immediately forwarded to the evaluators. Article selection involves an evaluation by experts and the Editorial Committee. In the summary, the sequence of article titles will obey the alphabetical order of authors’ surnames.
  • In line with Open Science practices, Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) offers authors and reviewers options for peer reviews (with or without name identification). Authorization to disclose names may be given by the authors at the time of the submission of their article and by the evaluators by filling out the Open Science Compliance Form. In the case of making public the evaluations that supported the decision to publish the chosen article, they may be edited by the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) editorial board. The contribution of section editors, if any, is to be duly credited in the published article. The evaluators will receive a statement of the manuscript opinion, and can validate such activity on Publons or Reviewer Credit.

Open data

  • Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) encourages the sharing of analysis datasets, instruments, statistical analysis scripts, and additional materials by making them available in open online repositories, such as SciELO Data, Zenodo, Figshare, and OSF, in case the article does not contain them. The manuscript must indicate this information. Thus, the articles that communicate research should indicate and reference the availability of the content underlying the elaboration of that research and its results.

Fee Collection

  • Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) charges no submission or processing fees.

Ethics and Misconduct, Errata, and Retraction Policies

Conflict of Interest Policy

-          Personal, commercial, academic, or financial conflicts of interest occur when authors, reviewers, or editors have interests that can influence manuscript preparation or evaluation. As for manuscript submissions, the authors must disclose financial or any other conflicts that may have influenced their research. Therefore, the authors must inform even potential cases of conflict of interest in a signed document to be attached to the submission platform. The authors must also identify in the manuscript any financial support toward their research and any other personal connection linked to their article. Editors and reviewers must also express any conflicts of interest that may influence their evaluation and decision and, if applicable, declare themselves unable to continue with the processing to avoid compromising ethical standards in the publication.

 

Adoption of similarity checking software

  • All articles submitted to Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) will be previously analyzed by the Plagius plagiarism detector. Plagiarism is considered the appropriation of others’ ideas, processes, results, or words without giving them due credit. A paragraph without proper citation is enough for a manuscript to be returned to its authors. Regarding self-plagiarism, Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) allows a maximum of 10% for articles or 50% when the manuscript results from master’s dissertations or PhD theses. Moreover, the manuscript will be returned to its authors, who can make the necessary changes and resubmit their article to the journal.

Cases of plagiarism that are reported to the journal after articles are published will be analyzed by the editorial committee and, if the complaint is confirmed, the article will be immediately withdrawn from the journal. Penalties may also be applied to the perpetrators.

 

Adoption of Artificial Intelligence resources

The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) is studying the possibility of adopting artificial intelligence in its editorial policy.

 

 

Sex and Gender Issues

  • The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) editorial team and the authors who publish in the journal should always observe the guidelines on Sex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER. They comprise a set of guidelines to report sex and gender information in study designs, data analyses, findings, and result interpretation. Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) also observes gender equity policies in the composition of its editorial board.

 

Ethics Committee

-          The committee will evaluate whether the submitted work used no research with human beings or, if so, if it obeyed the determinations of Resolution No. 196/96 of the National Health Council (CNS) and whether the research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the authors’ institutions or from wherever it was carried out, which is to be attached to the submission. It will also evaluate whether free and informed consent forms were collected and if they are in the possession of the authors, those responsible for the research, and/or institutions and if they are available for consultation and verification.

Copyright

  • The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) uses a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0), thus preserving the integrity of its articles in an open access environment. The journal allows authors to retain unrestricted publication rights. Authors are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt their articles (remix, transform, and build on the material for any purpose, including commercial ones).
  • The authors grant the journal the right of first publication under License CC BY 4.0.

 

Intellectual Property and Terms of Use

  • Site Responsibility:
    • The Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) reserves the right to make spelling and grammatical changes to the originals to respect the standard norm of the language without, however, changing the authors’ writing style.
    • The originals will not be returned to the authors.
  • Author’s responsibility:
    • Authors retain full rights to the articles they publish in Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS), the total or partial reprint, deposit, or republication of which is subject to indicating the first publication in Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) via the CC-BY
    • Authors must describe the original publication source.
    • The opinions expressed by the authors are their sole responsibility.

- Latin American and Caribbean Journal of the Law of the Sea (LACJLOS) uses a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0), preserving the integrity of its articles in an open access environment. The journal allows authors to retain publication rights without restrictions. Thus, authors are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build on the material for any purpose, even commercially) their articles.