Infraestructura Vial belongs to the University of Costa Rica, it constitutes an academic and scientific instrument, focused on the autonomous development of research, teaching, technical cooperation, and technology transfer in matters related to the protection of road infrastructure and vital lines nationally and regionally through the dissemination of scientific papers, opinion articles, bibliographic review, technical papers, cases of study and letters to the editor.

Objective

Its main objective is the dissemination and transfer of specialized knowledge, to contribute to the adoption of modern and safe technological processes that strengthen production procedures and competitiveness in the field of transport infrastructure engineering in the fields of seismic, structural, the study of materials and their performance, geotechnics, geology, environmental, hydraulics, hydrology, drainage, management, risk assessment, safe mobility, and transportation.

Strategy

Work is being done to build a platform and a harmonized technological language that reliably attends in the shortest time and at the lowest cost, the technical problems related to the policies and plans of action for the development of road infrastructure in the country and the region through the rational combination of actions aimed at the development, specialization, and updating of human resources, investigation of specific problems, technical cooperation, and technology transfer.

Target Audience

The Infraestructura Vial journal targets regional (Costa Rican and Latin American) governmental institutions, local governments, professionals, academics, scholars, students, and the general public that is interested in topics of road infrastructure and its related areas. 

Journal Publications Frequency

From 2022, Infraestructura Vial will publish a single issue per year corresponding to the period from January to December each year. Each issue will be published in a continuous mode, which implies that the articles will be added and published once they are ready, so the issue remains open throughout the publication period.

Publishing Fees

Infraestructura Vial does not charge any kind of fee for the reception, submission process, or publication of papers.

Peer Review Process

Papers that are submitted to the Infraestructura Vial journal are subjected to a Double-Blind Peer Review process, where the journal conceals the name of the authors and reviewers during the process. This is done to avoid conflict of interests between the members involved in the process of accepting or rejecting a paper.

The procedure used to select the papers for publication is as follows:

1. Papers are submitted to the Executive Direction

In this phase, the Editor makes a preliminary review of the paper, with the purpose of:

• Checking if the content of the paper is within the scope of the journal.
• Making sure the paper meets the minimum requirements for publication.

In case the Editor considers that the paper is out of the scope of the Infraestructura Vial, the authors will be notified of the rejection. If the submitted paper is within the scope of the journal, but it does not meet the minimum requirements for publication, the Editor will notify the authors and request them to resubmit the paper when it complies with the requirements.

2. Editorial Board Review

Once the paper complies with the aforementioned requirements, the paper will go through a preselection process by the Editorial Board. After the process, the members of the entity will give the recommendation to the Editor of whether to continue or not with the revision process  However, it is at the discretion of the Editor to accept or to reject the recommendation given by the Editorial Board.

3. Assignation of external reviewers

Preselected papers are reviewed by at least two members of the Editorial Board, which will recommend the Editor a group of possible reviewers for the article.

4. External Review

After the Editorial Board review, the papers are sent to at least two external reviewers that are considered experts on the topic. This group of experts is chosen by the Editor of the journal. The estimated time for reviewing is 30 calendar days.

The reviewers will read and analyze the paper to evaluate its quality. Additionally, the Editor will ask the reviewers to check the originality of its contents and identify possible sources of plagiarism. If any of these irregularities are detected, the reviewers will promptly notify the Editor. In case of plagiarism, the procedure described in the section Plagiarism Detection Policy will be applied.

When revisions are complete, one of five possible outcomes can be recommended by the reviewers as follows:

• Accept and publish the paper
• Accept and publish the paper after corrections
• Resubmit the paper for a second review
• Resubmit the paper for a different publication
• Reject the paper

In case the reviewers request that revisions and corrections are made to the article, the Editor will contact the authors and assign a timeframe of 15 days to make the corrections, include any additional information, and submit the corrected manuscript. Finally, the Editor will make the decision to either accept or reject the paper, which is communicated to the authors.

The current Review Form follows:

Review form

5. Publication

After completion of the previous stages, the paper is included in the list to be published. The process from reception to publication takes 3 months, approximately.

Plagiarism Detection Policy

The process of plagiarism detection is assigned to each reviewer during the revision process. In the first stage, the Editor will use Turnitin to locate ideas without citations or the use of exact words taken from other authors. Later, the reviewers are requested to report any anomaly or indication of plagiarism, which will be thoroughly revised by the Editor.

In case plagiarism is detected, the Editor will notify the main author, who will have a timeframe of 15 calendar days to present an appeal (if necessary), which will be evaluated by the Editor, and depending on the severity, a decision will be taken to either continue with the revision process or to reject the paper.

Ethics Policy

This journal adopts, as its Ethics Policy, the document titled Good Editorial Guidelines and Ethics Policy developed by the e-Ciencias journal, which was based on the following documents:

• Law N° 6683 about Author Rights and Related Rights and its reforms in Law N° 7979, of the Republic of Costa Rica
• Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, de Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, 2015).
• COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, de Committee on Publication Ethics (2013).
• Research Guidelines, University of Costa Rica (2016).
• Retraction Guidelines, Committee on Publication Ethics (2009).
• Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2015).
• Ethics in Research & Publication, Elsevier (2014).
• Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, COPE (2011).
• Ethics in scientific journals, Baiget (2010).

The document presents the defined roles and responsibilities of the authors, reviewers, editors, and members of the Editorial Board. Additionally, it defines and explains editorial conflicts and infringements, as well as the disciplinary actions taken in case of incurring such conduct.

Digital Preservation Policy

This Journal is part of the PKP-PLN network that uses LOCKSS for the digital preservation of published information. More info in ISSN

In addition, the journal guarantees the digital preservation of its contents through a backup server located in the National Laboratory of Materials and Structural Models (LanammeUCR) and an external storage device.

Originality Requirement

Infraestructura Vial demands originality in the submission of all papers that are submitted.

During the submission process, the author will have to agree with the clause: “This submission has not been published before nor presented in another journal (unless an explication has been given to the Editor)”.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its contents under the principle that making research available to the public free of cost, promotes a greater exchange of knowledge at a global level. This way, the Infraestructura Vial journal guarantees its readers the possibility of using, spreading, sharing, and making digital or printed copies of its contents, as long as the authors of the work are acknowledged.

Access and Reuse Policy

The Infraestructura Vial journal is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), where the reader has the rights to share, copy and redistribute the contents of the journal in the desired mediums and formats, under the following terms:

1. Giving appropriate credit to the authors.
2. No using the material for commercial purposes.
3. Not distributing a modified version of the material.

Interoperability protocol

This journal follows the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH): Check it here

Infraestructura Vial History

The journal Infraestructura Vial is part of the Transportation Infrastructure Program (PITRA) of the National Laboratory of Materials and Structural Models of the University of Costa Rica (LanammeUCR). Its first number was published in December 1999.

The journal has the participation of authors from more than 35 countries around the world.

The journal publishes technical papers and investigations related to transportation infrastructure. It includes content related to new technologies applied to transportation and highway engineering. It also has an opinion section that allows highway and transportation engineers from around the world to share their experiences.

Sources of Support

Taxation and Tax Efficiency Law N° 8114.

Disclaimer

The contents of papers published by Infraestructura Vial represent inputs within a knowledge generation process that, by themselves, a priori, do not constitute a declaration of a regulation, procedure, criterion or official tool of obligatory compliance in the management of public road projects in Costa Rica, by LanammeUCR. Any official position for Costa Rica on specific aspects contemplated in this document will be carried out through the corresponding means, according to the guidelines of the University of Costa Rica, Law 8114 and its Regulation to Art 6 (Decree 37016 - MOPT).

 

Last updated: 16/03/2021 by ABS and PLM.