Focus and Scope

ITECKNE is a journal of science and technology, semi-annually published by the Division of Engineering and Architecture at Santo Tomás University since 2002. ITECKNE is a means of divulgation which seeks to promote scientific publication that contributes to the development of science and industry on a national and international context.

ITECKNE mainly publishes original research articles in the areas of: Environmental Chemistry, Basic Science, Telecommunications, Mechatronics, Mechanical, Industrial, Civil, Environmental, Electronic, Systems Engineering and other areas related to Engineering. Occasionally the Journal publishes review and reflection articles that contribute significantly to the state of art of an important subject. Only case report articles that present new methodologies for a specific unexplored case are published.

ITECKNE Journal is classified in the National Bibliographic index Publindex as category C; LATINDEX; EBSCO Academic Source; Dialnet, Periodica, SciELO Colombia,Qualis Engenharias III:B5, Actualidad Iberoamericana Index, SciELO Citation Index and Emerging Sources Citation Index.

ITECKNE does not charge by the submission or any phase of editorial process

Peer Review Process

In order to increase the visibility and international citation of the authors that publish in ITECKNE, as well as the visibility and international citation of the Journal, the Editorial Committee recommends the authors present their articles in English.

All manuscripts submitted for publication must be original and unpublished, and cannot be submitted for publication simultaneously in other journals. Once the manuscripts are received through the Open Journal System (OJS) and after verification of compliance with the Instructions to the authors, the evaluation process is initiated through the "double blind" process, the manuscripts are sent to the peer external evaluators experts in the respective area, whose identities will not be known by the author and, in turn, peer reviewers will not know the identity (s) of the author (s).

The peer evaluation process is carried out according to the following procedure:

1. Once the manuscript is received, the Editorial Committee makes a first evaluation, after which it can be rejected without further evaluation or it is accepted for the evaluation of the external evaluating peers. Therefore, authors are not assured of the immediate publication of said manuscript. The decision of rejected is final and unappealable.
2. Manuscripts can be rejected in this first evaluation because they do not comply with the requirements of writing, presentation, structure, indicated in the appendix INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AUTHORS or are not sufficiently original and / or pertinent with the publication to be edited.
3. The manuscripts that are accepted in this first stage, initiate the evaluation through the process of   "double-blind".
4. As soon as the results of the evaluation made by the peer reviewers are received, the Editorial Committee defines the response on the evaluation process and communicates any of the following answers:

• Accepted for publication without modifications: the article will be published as it has been received and only spelling and style corrections will be made.
• Accepted for publication with minor corrections: the article will be published once the authors make the minor corrections suggested by the evaluators. These will be reviewed by the editorial committee, who will decide if they are accepted or not.
• Accepted with major corrections: The article must be corrected both in content and in accordance with the suggestions made by the evaluators. These will be reviewed by the editorial committee, which reserves the right to send or not the changes made to the evaluators, this will depend on the degree of complexity of the corrections.
• Rejected: The article is not accepted for publication.

 If the article is accepted, but with the recommendation to make modifications, it will be returned to the author (s) along with the recommendations of the peer reviewers to prepare a new corrected version for which they have a maximum term of (10) ten days to make minor corrections and (30) thirty days to make major corrections.

Authors must submit the corrected version together with the ITECKNE JOURNAL FOR CHANGES FOR ARTICLES FORMAT in which they explain in detail the changes made in accordance with the recommendations received, and the authors must highlight the changes made in the text of the article. The Editor together with the Editorial Committee will determine their acceptance, considering the concept of the evaluators and the corrections made by the author (s).

1. In all cases, the authors will be informed of the results of the evaluation process with the arguments that support the decision of the Editorial Committee and / or the Arbitration Committee.

The management of ITECKNE Journal is not responsible for the content of the articles, nor for its publication in other media. The content of each article is the sole responsibility of its author (s) and does not commit the University

Open Access Policy

Editorial management times

ITECKNE, acknowledges receipt of the manuscripts received by the authors by means of an email sent through the OJS platform. Once the manuscripts have been received, the following editorial management times are estimated: 

1. A time of (10) ten days, for the issuance of the concept of "in review" given by the editor.
2. At the moment in which the editor endorses the manuscript for review, the editorial team proceeds to request the evaluation of the manuscript for at least two peer reviewers. The time limit between the request and the response of an evaluating peer is (15) fifteen days. If, in the course of those days, there is no response, we proceed to send the evaluation request to another peer.
3. Once the evaluating peer agrees to review the manuscript, the article evaluation form will be sent to them. They have a maximum period of (20) twenty days to make and send their review. The evaluation process depends directly on the availability of peers. The times for sending the evaluations are variable, since they are subject to the availability of the peers, who conduct a review ad honorem.
4. After receiving the evaluation results, the editorial team will issue and communicate any of the answers indicated in the peer evaluation process.
5. In case of acceptance with conditions, the authors will be notified and the change control format will be sent to them through the correspondent's email. The author has a maximum period of (10) ten days to make minor corrections and (30) thirty days to make major corrections.
6. After receiving the corrected version of the manuscript, the editorial team will make the revision in order to endorse it or not. The editorial team reserves the right to send or not the changes made to the evaluators, this will depend on the degree of complexity of the corrections.  
7. If, finally, the manuscript is accepted, the authors are notified through the email of the corresponding author and the process of layout and style correction is started, then the document is published in its digital version and in its printed version.  The time elapsed until the printing of the paper version, depends entirely on the management of the department of publications of Santo Tomas University.
8. In the event that after three (3) months, the article cannot be submitted to peer evaluation, the authors are notified so that they decide if they continue with the editorial process.

Instructions to authors

In order to increase the visibility and the international citation of the authors and the journal, ITECKNE recommends the authors present their articles in English.

ITECKNE, has a biannual periodicity and publishes mainly original articles of scientific research and technological innovation. ITECKNE is dedicated to students, teachers, scientists and researchers in the academic, business and research sectors interested in the areas of Environmental Chemistry, Basic Sciences, Engineering: Telecommunications, Mechatronics, Mechanics, Industrial, Civil, Environmental, Electronics, Systems and others related to Engineering.

All manuscripts submitted for publication must be original and unpublished, and can not be submitted for publication simultaneously in other journals.

POSTULATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

1. The submission of a manuscript must be done through the manager Open Journal System (OJS) of the library of Santo Tomas University - Bucaramanga, where interested parties must register with the role of author.

2. For the postulation of the manuscript before the journal, the author must upload:  

• PRESENTATION LETTER of the article, duly completed and signed by each of the authors.
• Manuscript adjusted completely according to the indications given in the manuscript format section of these instructions.
• The figures, photographs or any other visual material, different from the tables, in JPG format. They must be numbered in order of appearance in the manuscript (e.g. Figure 1) to facilitate the subsequent process of diagramming. All images must be sent in a single file: .ZIP or .RAR.

FORMAT OF THE MANUSCRIPT

1. The manuscript must be sent in word processor format (.doc or .docx) and have a maximum length of 15 letter-size pages, in Arial 10, in a single space and with all margins of 3 cm. and it must be written in a single column.
2. The tables should be numbered consecutively with Roman numerals and referenced within the text as Table # (e.g. Table I); its title must be written in a capital letter, located in the upper part of the body of the table with central tabulation, in Arial 8; the contents of the table in Arial 7. Inserted tables will not be accepted as graphic objects.
3. The equations must be clear; they must be done using an equation editor and adopt the International Notation System. Within the text they should be centered and numbered with Arabic numerals in parentheses to their right. The equations must be referenced within the body of the text as "(1)" or "Equation (1)", for example:
4. In Equation (1) there is an example of the proper positioning of these
5. The figures should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals and referenced within the text using the abbreviation "Fig. # "(e.g. Fig. 1). The titles of the figures must be written in a capital letter, located at the top of the figure with a central tab, in Arial 8.

STRUCTURE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

The manuscript must contain the following sections: 

• Title (in Spanish and English): Must be clear, precise, without acronyms or abbreviations and of a length of no more than 15 words.
• Author (s): Full names, last academic title obtained, institutional affiliation (full name of the institution, city and country), email and ORCID.
• Keywords (in Spanish and English): Between four and ten words that locate the article in specific thesauri (IEEE or UNESCO).
• Analytical summary (in Spanish and English): Between 200 and 300 words, you must clearly and briefly indicate the purpose of the research, the methods, results and main conclusions. Avoid the use of abbreviations, you should not mention the structure of the article.
• Introduction: It must contextualize the reader, include background, justification and fundamental concepts.
• Methodology: What was done in the research is described, the materials, procedures and tools used are usually related.
• Results: Synthesize the results obtained, which must be presented in coherence with the proposed objectives.
• Discussion and Conclusions: Carry out the analysis of the results obtained, present the authors' opinions on the development of the work, make comparison with reference works and highlight why the work is relevant.
• References: Use the citation style of references defined by the IEEE, including at the end of each reference the DOI of the document, if you have it.

The sections and their corresponding divisions of the body of the document must be numbered with Arabic down to the third level (1, 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.2.1 ...). If a fourth level is required, it must be done through the use of bullets.

GUIDE TO DEVELOP REFERENCES

References should be included within the text; according to the editorial style manual IEEE including at the end of each reference the DOI of the document, if you have it.

References should be written between square brackets and the punctuation marks of the sentence where the reference is housed should be left out of the individual brackets separated by commas, for example:

... as indicated by Brown [4], [5]; as mentioned previously [2], [4] - [7]; Smith [4] and Brown and Jones [5]; Wood et al. [7])

Note: Use et al. when there are more than three authors. The word "reference" or its abbreviation "ref." should not be used.

The following distribution of reference percentages is recommended:  

• Maximum 40% of references must be Latin American.
• Minimum 70% of references of international journals published outside of Latin America.
• Minimum 70% of references of the last five years.
• Maximum 15% of references to monographs.
• Minimum 1 reference of the ITECKNE Journal of the last five years.

The references located at the end of the document (minimum 15), must be listed consecutively and in order of appearance in the work and with the following format:

- Books:

Author (s), Name of the book. Location: Editor, year.

[1] W. Strunk, and EB White, The Elements of Style. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1959.

- Chapters of books:

Author (s), "Name of the chapter," in Name of the book. Location: Editor, year, pp. xx-xx.

[1] ED Lipson, and BD Horwitz, "Photosensory reception and transduction," in Sensory Receptors and Signal Transduction. New York: Wiley-Liss, 2001, pp-1-64.

- Journal articles:

Author (s), "Title of the article," Name of the journal, vol. (number), pp. xx-xx, abbreviated month, year. DOI.

[2] KS Cole, and RH Cole, "Dispersion and absorption in dielectrics I. Alternating current characteristics," The Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 9 (2), pp.341-351, Apr. 1941. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1750906.

- Article or report of conferences:

Author (s), "Title of the article," in Name of the conference, city of the conference, country of the conference, year, pp. xx-xx. DOI.

[3] E. Detyna, "Perfect Invisible Fluids and Gauge Theory in Mathematical Methods in Hydrodynamics and Integrability in Dynamical Systems," in AIP Conference Proceedings, Rome, Italy, 1982, p.99-107.

For additional examples, review the document provided by the IEEE (https://ieee-dataport.org/sites/default/files/analysis/27/IEEE%20Citation%20Guidelines.pdf). Likewise, it is suggested to validate the references through the system offered by the IEEE (http://refassist.ieee.org/).

Declaration of ethics

For ITECKNE, it is very important that all parties involved in the publication process know and respect the ethics and good practices statement presented here.  ITECKNE follows the Good Practice Guide for journal editors and the Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE) http://publicationethics.org/. Likewise, the provisions of the Habeas Data - Statutory Law 1266 of 2008 for the handling of personal information in databases are accepted.

REGARDING THE EDITOR

The editor of ITECKNE Journal agrees to give impartial consideration to all texts submitted for publication, judging each on its own merits without regard to the author's race, gender, religious beliefs, ethnic origin, nationality or political philosophy. All authors are treated with fairness, courtesy, objectivity and honesty.

The editor and members of the editorial committee will in no case reveal any information about a manuscript under consideration to anyone other than the arbitrators (peer reviewers). They also guarantee the confidentiality of the evaluators.

Unpublished information, arguments or interpretations disclosed in a submitted manuscript will not be used in the research itself that the editor may be developing, except with the consent of the author or after the work has been published.

REGARDING AUTHORS

ITECKNE Journal requires that all authors present the manuscript postulated for publication, accompanied by the LETTER OF PRESENTATION, through which the authors declare that:

• it is an original work.
• it has not been previously published in another medium.
• it has not been submitted simultaneously to another publication.
• they are exclusive holders of the patrimonial and moral rights of the author

The author declares that:

• their rights to the manuscript are free of liens, encumbrances, limitations or conditions (resolutory or otherwise), as well as any circumstance that affects the free disposition of them.
• all the authors have contributed intellectually in its elaboration.
• all authors have read and approved the final version of the submitted manuscript.

When part of the content of the manuscript has been published or disseminated by other means, the authors must recognize and cite the respective sources and academic credits.

REGARDING THE EVALUATORS

The evaluation of the items is done through a "double-blind" process; items are sent to referees, expert in the respective area, whose identities will not be known to the author and, in turn, peer reviewers will not know the identity of the author(s). Referees must inform the editor in the shortest time possible, if they are able to perform the evaluation of the article assigned.

The evaluators of a manuscript must objectively judge the quality of the manuscript and respect the intellectual independence of the authors.  Evaluators should treat a submitted manuscript for review as a confidential document. They should not show or discuss it with others, except in special cases, to people who they may seek for specific advice; In this case, the identity of those consulted should be disclosed to the editor. They should explain and support their judgments adequately for publishers and authors to understand the intent of their comments.

If referees find elements of plagiarism or there is a substantial similarity between the manuscript in question and any published work or a manuscript simultaneously submitted to another journal, they must inform the editor.

Evaluators should not evaluate manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest.

Plagiarism detection

The editorial team will verify the originality of the text for cases of improper citation or possible plagiarism use Turnitin service (www.turnitin.com); this tool contrasts the manuscript evaluated against current and archived web pages, student papers and publications of major scientific publishers such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis or IEEE. When a manuscript presents minor problems citation, which will be returned to the authors to make the appropriate changes, but any other problems cause the manuscript be automatically rejected the manuscript, even without having been reviewed by academic peers.