Journal Description 

 Peer review and Open Access journal,  Founded in 1995 by Jose Marti University of Pedagogical Sciences. Published by the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz University of Camagüey since 2014. This journal publishes original scientific papers, short communications, thesis dissertations, scientific reports of plants cultivated in Cuba, and information of events related to sustainable agriculture and its teaching.

 Topics

Sustainability of production in agriculture. Adaptation of production in agriculture to climatic change.  Agrobiodiversity and its management. Participatory plant breeding. Rural extension. Sustainable land management. Applied botany. Gender studies in agriculture.  Professional education and didactics of agricultural sciences.

                                                     Editorial policies

Peer review policy.  Agrisost is a peer-reviewed journal (two or three reviewers).  All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, and an editorial decision is generally reached in 15 days of submission. This journal utilizes a double-blind peer-review process in which information from the authors and reviewers is withheld from each other. The final decision will be unappealable.  The peer-review decisions will be notified to the corresponding author.  The author should re-submit the corrected manuscript, and attach another document explaining the recommended changes that were not made and why.   The corrected manuscript will be submitted for a second review, and the attachment will be assessed by the Advisory Committee. The review of the corrected manuscript will not exceed 10 working days, then the paper will go to the editorial board for publication in the next volume. The papers that are not re-submitted within a three-month period will be removed from the journal's database. Authors who wish to withdraw their papers from the journal should send a signed written request to the Editorial Board, always before the acceptance date for publication.

IMPORTANT

Please read the guidelines below to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.

•  Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Agrisost will be reviewed. Read the submission guidelines carefully in the authors section/instructions to authors. 
•  Register as an author in the journal, and get your persistent researcher identifier

at ORCID (www.orcid.org) to complete this field in the profile.

•  Register in IraLis (International Registry of Authors-Links to Identify

Scientists), a standardization system of signatures for scientific authors

(http://www.iralis.org/es/node/20).

•  We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors 
•  Download the manuscript template, and use it.
•  It is the policy of Agrisost to require a cover letter and a declaration of conflicting interests

. If no conflict exists, please state that ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest´. The templates are available to authors. 

•  Follow every instruction at the journal's site, throughout the different stages of the editorial process.
•  Check if every guideline has been completed. The manuscripts that do not meet the guidelines will be rejected by the Editorial Board.

CODE OF CONDUCT AND GOOD PRACTICES

The journal's contents should follow the ethical standards that guarantee transparency, soundness, and reliability of the results. This code comprises the essential guidelines of the Committee on Publication Practice (COPE) adapted to the journal's requirements. (Albert & Wager, 2003), (Wager & Kleinert, 2011) and (Hames, 2013).

AUTHORS

 Authorship credits The author of a journal should meet the following conditions[1]:

1. Significant contributions to the conception, design, data collection or data analysis, interpretation, and paper redaction.
2. Critical review of the manuscript, with content-valid criteria.
3. Acceptance of the final version of the manuscript submitted for review.

 Take responsibility for the content of the manuscript.

 Abstain from copying references from unread articles.

 Warn the editor about any errors in the manuscript submitted or the paper published.

 Cite and quote the work of other researchers properly.

 Meet the legal standards established for the field of study of the manuscript.

 Describe research process clearly and accurately, in order for other researchers to contrast or validate the results presented.

 Avoid the omission of inconveniences faced during the research or unexpected consequences.

 State the findings in a clear, precise, and coherent way, in accordance with the state of the art of the object of study presented in the manuscript.

 Submit an original manuscript, and avoid submitting split content of research for publication which cannot be separated or published under another title in a different journal. Anti-plagiarism tools should be used during manuscript redaction.

 Do not submit the manuscript to various journals simultaneously; wait until the editorial decision is made before making a new submission.

 Reply in duly time to recommendations made in the review.

 Present the evidence requested by the journal in case of conflict of interests, authorship claims, and suspicion of plagiarism.

 

Reviewers

Mandatory principles

 Review manuscripts in their field of expertise.

 Respect the confidentiality of the review process, and do not reveal details of the manuscript before, during or after the review process. Do not include other specialists.

 Do not use the information object of review for self-benefit or to benefit others or discredit other parts.

 Perform review objectively, and abstain from expressing offensive or degrading judgement.

 Meet the deadline for review.

 

Prior to accepting the manuscript for review

 Declare if you are not qualified enough in the topic and can only assess part of the manuscript, which you should specify.

 Declare conflicts of interests motivated by personal, financial, scientific, professional, religious, or other relations, and follow the standards set by the journal in such cases.

 Do not accept the review of a manuscript if you are not interested or if you are unable to perform fair and objective assessment or if you are related to it in any way.

 Refuse to review any manuscript if you disagree with the editorial policy of the journal.

 Evaluate any manuscript that has been reviewed by another journal, whose requisites are different, previously agreed between the two journals, and editor's criterion.

 

Review process

 Meet the editorial standards of the journal.

 Make sure that the recommendations made are not influenced by personal criteria with the clear intention of accepting or refusing the manuscript.

 Report to the journal's editor about any signs of violations of the double blind peer review process or manifestations of plagiarism or conflict of interests detected in the review process.

 Avoid contacting the author(s) during the review.

 Complete the review form objectively, rigorously, clearly, and accurately so the author can meet all the requirements and improve the manuscript.

 Make sure that both the reviewed manuscript and the form do not contain metadata that provide the identity of the reviewer.

 Meet the delivery terms after the review.

 

Post-review process

 Meet the previous recommendations in case a formerly assessed manuscript is re-submitted.

REFERENCES

Albert, T., & Wager, E. (2003). How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers. The COPE Report 2003, 32-34.

Hames, I. (2013). COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. COPE Council v.1.

Wager, E., & Kleinert , S. (2011). Responsible research publication: international standards for authors. A position statement developed at the . Chapter 50 in: Mayer T & Steneck N (eds) Promoting Research Integrity in a Global Environment. Imperial College Press / World Scientific Pub. 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, Singapore, July 22-24, 2010, (págs. 310-316). Singapore.

 

[1] Albert, T., & Wager, E. (2003). How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers. The COPE Report 2003, 32-34. AGRISOST ISSN 2015-0247 RNPS 1831 Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz University of Camagüey https://agrisost.reduc.edu.cu/index.php/agrisost

 

• Anti-plagiarism policy

  The Editorial Board of the journal  verifies the originality of the contents presented in the manuscripts. Editors, referees and other staff who work in editing documents reviewed considering the title, authors, keywords, etc., on the network and Internet. If detected up to 4 literal equal paragraphs that appear in another publication, the manuscript is returned to the authors that they may be corrected; if detected more paragraphs, the document is returned to the authors and dismisses for lack of originality. Agrisost  use the Plagiarism program to check the contents of the articles. The program generates a report highlighting the percentage match between the uploaded article and published material. Agricultural Center allows up to a 20 % similarity to consider the manuscript as original. The journal encourages authors to notify the Editor in Chief if they discover errors in the published content, authors' names and affiliations or have concerns about the legitimacy of a publication. Articles that may contain infractions of professional ethical codes, such as multiple presentation, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like are rejected for lack of originality.

   

Publication Charges

Agrisost  has neither article processing charges nor submission charges.

Open access policy

All articles published are open access and immediately made available on-line since its publication on the website of the journal. Readers can read, download, copy, distribute, print, translate, search or link to the full texts of the articles are published at no cost. All articles are licensed under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ,except where specified otherwise, allowing the use, distribution, reproduction in any medium and translation of the content without restrictions, provided that the work is properly cited.

Copyright

The authors of the articles published in Agrisost  retain copyright of their work, but agree that the journal publish the work under a Creative Commons. Authors can submit to be published free of cost, research articles short communications, opinion articles and reviews in the journal. Submitting a manuscript to the journal for publication implies that all authors have read and accepted all terms and conditions of the journal and agree that the manuscript is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International which allows unrestricted use, distribution of the document, translation and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited. In addition, we also agree that the document can be housed on the site of the journal,  or other indexer journal, where you can read, download, copy, distribute, print, translate, search or link to the full texts articles that are published.

a) The author's commitment not to submit it to the consideration of other publications.
b) Assignment of the right in the name of the journal.
c) Assignment of non-exclusive right.
Through the letter of originality and declaration of authorship, the authors make formal declaration of the original and unpublished character of its text, and of its exclusive sending to this magazine; they assume full responsibility for the ideas and criteria presented; accept that the submission is subject to peer review and subject to amendments; and express their agreement on the deadlines established in the "peer evaluation" session.

Formal and general requisites

The title should be a sentence (justified, 16-19 words). The general title of the manuscript will use  Times New Roman, 12.0 pt., capitalized, without indentation, simple line spacing (6.0 pt. between paragraphs).  Italics and underlining are not allowed.

Paragraph margins: top, bottom, and inside (2.5 cm), outside (1.5 cm) , and binding (1,0 cm). Paper size: Letter, with symmetric margins. Extension 10-25 pages.  Abbreviations should not be used, unless strictly necessary, they will never be used in titles.  The most usual abbreviations will be,

10. (page), pp. (pages), ss. (following), op. cit. (cited work), ed. (editor, editorial or edition). The notes will be placed on the bottom of the page (Times New Roman, 10.0 pt.). The figure footnotes (Fig.1... ), and identifications of tables (Table 2. ... ) will use Times New Roman (10.0 pt.).

Tables

The title should explain the content. It will be centered and separated four spaces from the last line above. The tables will be numbered consecutively (Arab numbers) in order of appearance (according to citations in the text). The table contents should be self-explanatory.

Tables should be made in MS Word (*.docx) or MS Excel (*.xls). but never as images or imbedded objects in the document; text boxes are not permitted. Every

table will be cited in the text, numbered by order of appearance, in Arab numbers. The journal urges you not to use symbols to indicate the absence of any data (you may leave blank spaces). Null or zero reading should appear as “0”. Always use “+” to indicate presence or positive result. Use “-” to indicate absence or negative result.

Every table must have a title and explanatory notes when necessary.  The format is shown below (Table 1).

Table 1. Font size and style

		Item  Title of the table		Size      10				Style  Normal
	Text and data					10                           Normal

                                  Notes:

Figures

Graphs, maps, drawing, and photos are figures, and it is stated in abbreviated form with initial capital letter (Fig. or Figs.); made with Microsoft Office Suite. Figures should allow for resizing during the edition process. Number the figures consecutively, with informative self-explanatory title. If figures are attached, please, inform about their location in the main text. Graphs should be in EXCEL format in an attachment with the original data. Images should be in JPG format (100 kb max).

Scientific articles and short reports

Scientific articles disclose the results of original research made by the authors.  Short reports are

original and never published before. Their aim is to report about preliminary results of observations, case studies, or experimental results. They have the same structure of articles.

  TITLE

ABSTRACT

No more than 250 words for articles, and 150 words for short reports.

KEYWORDS/:  

INTRODUCTION

The introduction should answer these questions: Why do you conduct this research? What do you intend to know? It should have three parts: The background of the research and a brief review of related literature, in order for the readers to evaluate the manuscript submitted, the rationale and aim of the paper

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The questions for this section are, What did you use? and What did you do?. You should also describe the parameters utilized. Interpretations are not allowed. However, be sure to have described everything in detail, so other researchers can follow your research. Explain why you chose a particular treatment or method in the study above others. State your assumptions. It will allow readers to understand the purpose in using the methods you will describe. Follow a logical order; this section has materials and methods.

MATERIALS

Describe all the materials (chemicals, animals, plants, equipment, etc.) used in the research. Identify chemical compounds (fertilizers, etc.) so other researchers can use the same materials. In case you use commercial names, you should add the complete chemical name or active ingredient the first time they are mentioned.

Use the international standards to name the different materials (international system of units, nomenclature, norms, etc.). The scientific names of animals and plants should be written in italics, then the authors, breeds, strains, cultivars or lines of any experimental plants, animals or microorganisms that were used. In other parts of the article do not include the authors when you refer to the same species.

METHODS

In this section you answer these questions: What did you do? and How did you do it? Describe

the research in a logical order. If you have used well-known methods, provide names and references. If you have changed any of them, please explain the method.  Mention the statistical techniques used.  If a particular technique is not so well-known, it is advisable to provide reference. Describe the method in detail only if it is new or original. If experiments are performed, indicate the experimental design, factors treatments, repetitions (space and time), plot size, calculation areas, plants to be evaluated/plot, statistical method for mean comparison, and probability levels. 

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

These questions must be answered; What do the results mean? Why did it happen? What were the implications? It is the most reflexive section, and also the most demanding, but the most important. The results must be interpreted so readers can understand the meanings of the findings. Accordingly, discuss the results of your research, comparing them with other results by other authors, and state your position.

CONCLUSIONS

They are general and must provide an essential explanation of how the aim of the study has been fulfilled, without reiterating the discussion above.

Different conclusions are written in different paragraphs, without bullets or numbering.

RECOMMENDATIONS 

Suggestions are made on further studies about the object of your research. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

You may include the colleagues who are not eligible for authorship or institutions that have contributed during some stages of your research, and what they did. 

  REFERENCES (See APA Style 7th Ed.)

 

Thesis dissertations

 MSC and PhD thesis dissertations of different topics can be published within the general theme of sustainable agriculture and its teaching. It will include research from other disciplines that deal with agroecological aspects. The text will be 8 000-10 000 words long, excluding references, tables, and figure footnotes. Structure of thesis dissertations: Title, authors and affiliation, Abstract, key words, Introduction, Materials and methods, Results and discussions, Conclusions, and References. The other formal requisites will follow the same guidelines for scientific articles and short reports.

Literature reviews

State of the art of sustainable agriculture and related topics, and their teaching. The text will be 8 000-10 000 words long, excluding references, tables, and figure footnotes. Monograph structure:

Title, authors and affiliation, Abstract, key words, Introduction, headings, Conclusions, and References. The other formal requisites will follow the same guidelines for scientific articles and short reports.

Book reviews

Reviews of books on sustainable agriculture and its teaching. The text will be 1 000-1 200 words long. The other formal requisites will follow the same guidelines for scientific

articles and short reports.

NOVUM CUBANUS PLANTAE COLUERUNT

It reveals the identity of plant species cultivated in Cuba, which have not been recorded so far in any referred scientific work in the country, or have been little publicized. The other formal requisites will follow the same guidelines for scientific articles and short reports.

MEETINGS

Brief description of scientific meetings on sustainable agriculture and its teaching. The text should not exceed 500 words.

The other formal requisites will follow the same guidelines for scientific articles and short reports.

 The Advisory Committee will update the submission guidelines every year.