About the Journal

FOCUS AND SCOPE

Bioagro is a scientific journal of the Agronomy Faculty of the Universidad Centroccidental "Lisandro Alvarado" (UCLA), in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Its periodicity is triannual and is published on the first day of the months of January, May and September. The journal is aimed, mainly but not exclusively, at professionals and technicians in the agricultural area.

The objective of the journal is the publication of original scientific papers in agricultural sciences that focus on aspects of agronomy, botany and plant breeding, entomology, soils, plant pathology and plant protection, agricultural engineering, genetics and plant breeding, ecology, industry and agricultural processing, forage production, biotechnology and social topics. Short articles may also be published in which scientific discoveries, technological developments and comprehensive diagnostics results are presented in the form of Technical Notes.

The journal gives preference to specific articles based on direct experimentation and whose results are interpreted in the light of inferential statistics, and eventually, to articles derived from descriptive research. We will not consider review articles, opinion pieces, or papers with only preliminary results.

 

PERIODICITY

Bioagro is published every four months in three editions identified as numbers 1, 2 y 3, thus conforming an annual volume. They cover the periods of January-April, May-August, and September-Decembe, respectively,  and are published at the beginning of each period.

 

INDEXING

Bioagro is indexed/registered in Agricola, Agris, CABI, Dialnet, Latindex Cathalogo, Redalyc, Redib, Revencyt, Scopus, Scielo, and SCI Expanded (WoS)

 

POLITICS

Privacy statement. The double-blind peer review system used by the journal does not allow the names, e-mails or any other information of the participating authors and reviewers to be revealed between the parties. 

Open access. Bioagro is an open access journal, meaning that all content is freely available at no charge to individuals or their institutions. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without prior permission from the publisher or author. This definition of open access is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Reuse of works may be done under the terms established by the CC BY-NC-SA license.

There are no fees for subscription, manuscript submission or evaluations; however, a contribution is requested from the authors of published articles to help with the maintenance of expenses related to computer equipment and accessories, internet service, editing, translation and layout, as well as the anti-plagiarism program iThenticate and DOI.

License. The papers are published in the journal under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The terms can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en

This license allows:

• Sharing: copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format.

• Adapting: remixing, transforming, and building upon the material.Under the following terms:

• Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if any changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses or sponsors your use.

• NonCommercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

• ShareAlike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your creation under the same license as the original work.

There are no additional restrictions. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Anti-plagiarism Policy. Bioagro is committed to maintaining high ethical and takes all possible measures against any professional negligence that takes place in its publication. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited and our contributors attest that their articles have not been copied or plagiarized, in whole or in part, from other publications.

Code of ethics. Bioagro´s editorial team adopts what is established by the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics - COPE) in order to guarantee the rigor and scientific quality of the journal with ethical commitment. It is understood that all the co-authors are aware of the submission of the manuscript, and also attest that it has not been published nor is its publication in another journal is being considered.

 

ORIGINALITY AND AUTHORSHIPS

Authors attest to the originality, authorship and conflict of interest policies, and consequently, a commitment letter must be submitted before starting the evaluation process. Papers submitted to Bioagro must be original and should not be simultaneously under evaluation in another journal or publication.

 During the review process, the journal will maintain communication only with the corresponding author, as indicated in the commitment letter. Once the journal receives the corrections from the authors, the list of co-authors or their order of participation cannot be modified.

In agreement with guidelines of the Publication Ethics Committee (COPE), Bioagro considers that listing an author in a paper is due to his significant contribution to the scientific content of the work. And it is understood that the order of authorship in a paper is the result of a general agreement of the authors.

 

MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION

The manuscripts will be submitted electronically exclusively to bioagro@ucla.edu.ve, and it is mandatory that the correspondence author keeps an active e-mail address during the manuscript processing because the communication with the Editor will be done by this mean.

Failure to comply with this requirement would hinder the processing and may be a reason for manuscript rejection.

Only in case of failure of the official mail, please send the manuscript through revistabioagro@gmail.com

The manuscript´ s structure, here: Author Guidelines

 

EVALUATION PROCESS

The journal receives and processes manuscripts throughout the year.

Upon reception, the manuscript is sent for initial inspection, and within one week the authors will be notified if the paper will continue the evaluation process, or if it is definitively rejected.

A fundamental part of the initial inspection includes the use of the anti-plagiarism program iThenticate. If any type of fraud is detected, the authors are asked for clarification; if they do not respond or their response is unsatisfactory, the article is immediately rejected. In more severe cases, a copy is sent to the authorities at the authors' institutions. If the article was published in more than one journal (including Bioagro), the article is withdrawn and the procedure is made public.

Once the papers were accepted for evaluation are sent to several referees for review. Authors may suggest three referees giving their full names, e-mail address and institution. The Editorial Board selects the most qualified referee from this list, and from the official list of the journal reviewers. The referees must have total independence from the authors of the manuscript and will have a period of three weeks to send their evaluation.

The official reception of the manuscripts corresponds to the date on which the authors consign all the documentation required by the journal. From that moment on, the average time for submitting the evaluation varies between three and four months.

If after reviewing the manuscript is not rejected, authors can take up to 21 days to submit the corrected version. A note with a detailed explanation of each observation to the document must be included.

 Bioagro uses the double-blind system for its evaluations.

Depending on the characteristics of the paper, the average time for the approved manuscripts to receive the acceptance letter varies between two and three months. 

Bioagro reserves the right to make grammatical adjustments to the text of the articles, as well as technical modifications to the figures and tables, all in accordance with the style and specifications of the journal.

DICTAMEN AND APPEALS

After reception, the manuscripts are sent to at least two specialists in the area. In the event of a controversy for opposing opinions between two reviewers, the manuscript is sent to a third reviewer, on whose opinion the acceptance or rejection depends. If controversy persists, the final decision is left to the Chief Editor.

Papers submitted to the journal may receive any of these opinions:

• Acceptable as submitted
• Publishable after minor changes
• Publishable after major changes
• Not publishable

If disagreeing the dictamen, authors of rejected manuscripts may send their appeals to the e-mail of any member of the Editorial Board. These electronic addresses appear in the Editorial Board site  https://revistas.uclave.org/index.php/bioagro/about/editorialTeam

On average, for the years 2019 and 2020, Bioagro presented a 65% rejection of the manuscripts submitted for evaluation.

 

PUBLICATION FEE

The following items show the  fee to pay by authors from submission to publication of their paper:

• Subscription … No charge
• Submission cost… No charge
• Article processing charge (APC)… No charge
• Page charge… A payment is required (*)

(*) It is used for computer maintenance and accessories, internet service, editing, translation and layout of the paper, as well as the anti-plagiarism program iThenticate and DOI.

 Page charge. The cost of articles coming from Venezuelan institutions is partially exempt, and represents only a symbolic amount of $ 1 per page, in the journal format. The first author is required to be attached to a Venezuelan institution, with a unique institutional e-mail (no business domains such as gmail, hotmail, etc.). However, for articles written in English, the fee is 3 dollars per page, in the journal format.

For articles from the Latin American Region the fee is $ 15 per page, in the journal format. However, for submissions written in English the fee is $ 25 per page, in the journal format.

For articles from other regions of the world the fee is $ 30 per page, in the journal format. Of these, a maximum of three articles will be accepted per year, selected for their impact and relevance to the Latin American Region, according to the opinion of the Editorial Board.

 

EDITORIAL DATA

E-mail: bioagro@ucla.edu.ve
ISSN:1316-3361  e-ISSN: 2521-9693
Legal Deposit: 198302LA723  
Languages of publication: Spanish, English.
Starting year: 1983. 
Frequency of publication: quaterly.
Place of edition: Barquisimeto, Venezuela.
Publisher entity: Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado.
Editor in chief: Dr. Rita Avila.
Key words of the journal:  Agronomy, botany and plants propagation, entomology and zoology, soils, phytopathology and plant protection,  agrícultural engineering, genetic, plant improvement, ecology, agrifood production, biotechnology and socials.

Digital Preservation Policy and Archived

Bioagro uses Open Journal Systems (OJS), which provides the PKP-PN (PKP-Preservation Network) tool and for this journal the respective Pluging is active.

CLOCKSS and LOCKSS storage periods:

• CLOCKSS: years 2013 to 2015
• LOOKSS: years 2018 to 2023

Bioagro is in its way to give continuity to the service of digital preservation service for the years not covered and beyond.

Bioagro journal is also complete and in open access in different databases such as DIALNET y Crossref, and since 2021 in Crossref, which guarantees its unique identification and location of its articles, protecting them from URL changes or similar. Finally, the journal publishes an HTML version of each article, which allows it to be exported to formats other than PDF, which currently exist or may appear in the future.

Interoperability Protocols
This journal provides an interface OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) that allows other websites and information services to harvest the published content metadata.

Specification:

OAI-PMH Protocol Version 2.0
Dublin Core Metadata

URL for harvesters:

https://revistas.uclave.org/index.php/bioagro/oai