Derecom. Derecho de la Comunicación y de Nuevas Tecnologías

Preamble

Derecom. The International Journal of Communications and New Technologies Law (ISSN:1988-2629) is a scientific journal led by the Consolidated Research Group ‘Transparency, Good Governance and Communication’ of the Departmental Section of Constitutional Law, in the Communications School at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). From the outset, the team leading the journal has sought to bring to the general public, firstly, and to specialists, from 2009 onwards, all those issues that concern lawyers, lecturers and professors and researchers focused on the right to information and on the freedom of speech: the legal status of journalists, the rights and duties of the general public, the regulation on news, propaganda, opinion, criticisms, advertising, public relations or any other kind of message that may arise, the regulation of the Mass Media and of the Social Media and the regulation of firms devoted to communicating either primarily or secondaril.

1. Management bodies
The management bodies responsible for the scientific coordination and editing of the journal shall be theEditorial Board and the Advisory Board. All members of these boards undertake to respect the principles of the Code of Ethics established by Ediciones Complutense for scientific journals.

1.1. Editorial Board: structure and composition
- The Editorial Board will be made up of the Editor, the two Secretaries and nine members. The position of Director must be held by an active lecturer with a permanent relationship at CUM. At least one third of its members must belong to institutions other than Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

- The Editorial Board will assist the Editor in all his/her functions and, in particular, in the monitoring of papers(submission, evaluation, acceptance) and in the shaping of contents and procedures of the journal (drafting ofrules for the presentation of originals, creation and orientation of sections, etc.).
- The members will be proposed by TRA.BU.COM. Research Group (Transparency, Good Governance and Communication, 931036) and the appointment will be ratified by the Council of the Department of Constitutional Law.
- Within the TRA.BU.COM. Research Group there will be three rounds of votes by absolute majority on the candidates proposed for each of the following positions: one for the election of the Editor, one for the election of the CUM members and one for the election of the external members. The position of Secretary shall be appointed directly by the Editor.
- The members of the Editorial Board shall be elected for a period of six years and may only be re-elected for a second six-year period.
Appointments to the positions of Editor and Secretary must be notified to the Vice-Rectorate for Culture, Sport and University Extension and to the Directorate of Ediciones Complutense, attaching the corresponding certificate issued by the Constitutional Law Council. The appointment will be effective from the moment of receipt of the aforementioned certificate, taking effect from the date of the appointment by the Council of the Department of Constitutional Law.

1.1.1. Duties of the Editor
- The Editor will be responsible for the coordination and representation of the journal, relations with the Editorial Board, the Advisory Board and Ediciones Complutense. He/she will also be in charge of relations with other institutions for any matter related to the journal.
- The Editor will elect the Secretary.
- The Editor shall convene the meetings of the Editorial Board.
- The Editor shall be responsible for informing the Department Council / Institute Council / School Board about the functioning of the journal and its needs.
- The Editor will be responsible for ensuring the maintenance of the highest scientific quality of the journal, as well as its recognition and inclusion in national and international databases and its evaluation for the achievement of quality seals, for which he/she will be assisted by the rest of the members of the Editorial Board.
- The Editor shall have a casting vote in the event of a tie in the deliberations of the Editorial Board.

1.1.2. Duties of the Secretary
- The Secretary will be responsible for the reception of the originals and their management throughout the evaluation and publication process.
- The Secretary will be responsible for communication with authors, members of the Editorial Board, the Advisory Board and Ediciones Complutense.
- The Secretary will acknowledge receipt to the authors of all papers received.

- The Secretary will organise the review process of the originals received by the Editorial Board in order to decide which papers are submitted for evaluation and which are returned, once compliance with the journal's requirements has been verified.
- The Secretary will be responsible for sending the manuscripts to the referees together with an instruction document and a review template.
- Once the decision to publish the manuscripts has been taken, the Secretary will be responsible for
communicating the decision to the authors.
- The Secretary will be responsible for monitoring the whole editorial process of the journal issues (preparation and delivery of manuscripts, layout process, sending proofs to authors, communication of the publication to authors).
- The Secretary will prepare the meetings with the Editor and take the minutes of the meetings of the Editorial Board. He/she shall also be responsible for the custody of the minutes and shall certify the work carried out by the members of the Editorial Board, the members of the Advisory Board and the referees.
- The Secretary will collaborate with the Editor in the dissemination of the journal, in institutional relations, exchanges, indexing and any other tasks that improve the quality and recognition of the journal.

1.1.3. Duties of the members of the Editorial Board
- The Members of the Editorial Board shall be obliged to attend the meetings called. When attendance in person is not possible for justified reasons, a virtual attendance system will be set up.
- The Members, under the coordination of the Secretary, shall cooperate in the preliminary reading of
manuscripts in order to decide which ones are submitted for evaluation and which ones are returned to authors.
- The Members will collaborate in the search for external evaluators for the papers and will not be able to evaluate them.
- The Members will advise and collaborate with the journal's Editor in any tasks that might be considered necessary for the fair functioning of the journal, including ensuring compliance with punctuality and periodicity.

1.2. Advisory Board
- The Advisory Board will be made up of practitioneers and researchers of well-known prestige and
creditworthiness, with no institutional links to the journal. It must serve, apart from giving the journal rigour, to set editorial policy, to make the journal attractive to both authors and readers, and to disseminate it, as far as possible, in all forums. It will also collaborate in the evaluation and auditing processes.
- At least ten percent of the members of the Advisory Board shall be from foreign institutions. The election process for its members will be as follows:
- They shall be elected by the Editorial Board as practitioneers of well-known prestige, at the proposal of a member of the Board. If the number of candidates proposed exceeds the number of vacancies available, the candidates with the highest number of votes shall be elected.
- The appointments must be ratified, as the case may be, by the Council of the Department of Constitutional Law.

- The members of the Advisory Board may participate in the evaluation processes of the manuscripts as external peers, bearing in mind that at least one of the evaluations will always be issued by an evaluator from outside the Advisory Board.

2. Traits and way of working
2.1. Periodicity
- The journal will be published with a periodicity of two issues per year. In addition, on an extraordinary basis, there might be proposed to Ediciones Complutense the publication of a special issue.

2.2. Structure
- The journal will consist of the following sections: Papers, Opinions, Essays, Book reviews, Reports and
Introduction to the issue. However, some of the complementary sections (Opinions, Essays, Reports and Book Reviews) may not be present in any of the issues, without this being a handicap to the publication of the issue.

2.3. Publication rules
- The publication guidelines will be attached as an appendix and should contain information on manuscript submission, editorial process (review, evaluation and publication of manuscripts), the international citation standard chosen, etc.