About the Journal

Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

Texto Livre is an open access online journal on a continuous publication basis. It is sponsored by the School of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) since 2008. Texto Livre welcomes submissions of articles, experience reports, essays, critical reviews and interviews, by peer-reviewed author, that address the multi/pluri/inter/transdisciplinarity in the lines of linguistics, semiotics, education, communication, information and computing technologies, translation, robotics and free culture related to technologies. Its mission is to promote scientific production along these lines, allowing researchers from Brazil and abroad to disseminate their research and contribute to the debate and scientific progress in the area. Related topics of interest to this periodical are: technology-mediated language teaching, communication in the media, use of technologies in teaching-learning, open educational resources, free culture, digital inclusion, digital literacy, impact of technologies on translation, dissemination in free software and other themes related to technologies. The journal accepts manuscripts in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French. Texto Livre is an academic publication intended for researchers as well as non-academic audiences interested in approaches to the topics addressed by the journal.

Peer Review Process

- Double-blind peer review.

-All submitted manuscripts that follow the author guidelines and the Code of Conduct and Best Practice need approval by the Editor in Chief, who will check for authorship issues (such as plagiarism, republication, approval by the Ethics Committee for research with human beings etc.). Any suspected cases of misconduct will be handled as outlined in the COPE Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

-The Editor in Chief assigns the manuscript to an assistant editor, who oversees the peer review process.

-The assistant editor sends the manuscripts to two referees, each from a different institution and not from the authors' institutions. These reviewers will not have access to the names of the authors nor will they know the names of their peers.

- The reviewers will answer a questionnaire with questions related to adequacy to the scope of the journal, topicality, quality, format and ethics, and their answers will be considered by the editor in the editorial decision.

- If both referees advise publication, the editor sends the manuscript to print, after having sent it to the author for the revisionsrequested by the referees.

- If there are two negative opinions, the submission will be rejected for publication and a message will be sent to the author with the opinions of the evaluators.

- If the two referees disagree on whether the manuscript should be published, the editor sends it to a third referee. If the third referee agrees the paper should be published, the submission is accepted; if there is a new negative opinion, it will not be accepted.

- All submitting authors are informed of accept or reject status and receive the referees' reports, either in the case of approval for publication, or in the case of non-approval. This communication must take place between one and two months from the submission date.

- The publication of the article takes place, on average, after six months of submission.

Editorial decision feature:

- If the author of a non-approved submission considers that one or both negative reviews present problems, he may request, through written justification to the editor-in-chief, that he ask the reviewers to present justification for the alleged flaws in the review(s) (es) within 15 days.

- If the editor-in-chief does not receive any justification for the request, the negative opinion(s) will be eliminated and the submission will be forwarded to new reviewers.

Appeals Regarding Editor Decisions:

- Authors who did not have their manuscripts accepted, and feel that one (or two) of the referees' reports is wrong or unjustified, may write an appeal letter to the Editor in Chief. The Editor in Chief will ask the referees to provide a report with further explanation on the grounds of the rejection within 15 days.

- If the Editor in Chief does not receive such report, the manuscript is sent to a different(s) referee(s).

Publication Frequency

From 2022 onwards, Texto Livre publishes texts in a continuous publication mode (rolling pass). The continuous publication or rolling pass is the publication of articles as they are approved, per year. There are no fascicles, no periodicity. There is no closed periodicity in months. This measure minimizes the problem of publication time between acceptance and publication of the approved article, precisely because of the great demand for submissions received by the Journal. We also consider it a way to give visibility and expand access to articles already refereed, allowing them to be edited, formatted, DOI validated and published continuously. The full summary and editorial will be published at the end of the year.

Open science

The Open Science movement proposes guidelines for collaborative, shared and public scientific practice. In line with the Open Science guidelines, Texto Livre adopts a series of practices, such as the open access policy, the code of good practices for editors and the use of social networks to disseminate published works. In addition, it requires the precise indication of the role of each of the authors in articles with multiple authorship, encourages the sharing of analysis datasets, instruments, statistical analysis scripts, scripts and additional materials, available in open online repositories, such as, eg Zenodo, Figshare and OSF, if they cannot be published in the work itself, and this information should be indicated in the manuscript. Consequently, the articles that communicate research should indicate and reference the availability of the contents underlying the elaboration of the research and the results obtained.

Texto Livre encourages the publication of preprint articles on public platforms, such as Preprints, SciELO and Psyarxiv, so that, if necessary, they are openly discussed before being published.

The contribution of the section editors is duly credited in the published article. Reviewers receive a statement of the manuscript's opinion and can also validate the activity on Publons.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. All content in the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution BY License. We also clarify that the author is not charged any fee for the publication of his article.

Digital preservation policy

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and allows them to create permanent archives of the journal for the preservation and restoration.

The Texto Livre already preserved and tested by LOCKSS team: https://cariniana.ibict.br/index.php/preservacao-de-publicacoes-digitais/periodicos-eletronicos

Thanks to Redalyc's indexing, the journal's articles are also preserved in the XML JATS format.

The articles are also preserved, from the 2021 issues, on the open GitHub platform.

Declaration of Ethics in Research and Best Practices

The Texto Livre - electronic ISSN 1983-3652, is dedicated to complying with good practices regarding the moral conduct consistent with scientific publishing of journals. Any form of unethical behavior, as well as plagiarism in any instance, is not accepted by Texto Livre. Authors who submit articles to the journal declare that their content is original and guarantee that the paper has not been published nor is in the process of being revised/evaluated by any other periodical. In addition, it is expected that all articles that report research with human beings contain relevant information on ethical procedures, attaching proof of approval by the Ethics Committee when submitting.

Fees for submission and publication of texts

The Texto Livre does not charge any fee for published texts, nor for those submitted for evaluation, review, publication, dissemination, or download. Publication is completely free.

Texto Livre Publication Themes

Language and Technology

Education and Technology

Communication and Technology

Translation and Technology

Open culture

Pedagogical robotics

Information and Communication Technologies

Section Policies

Articles

It comprises scientific works with an unpublished and original theme. Also welcomes works that originate from a scientific study encompassing also texts that contain complete reports or studies completed research or development.

Dossier

Set of scientific articles with a single thematic purpose, which will be defined by the Editorial Committee and organized by specialist researchers.

Experience reports

Section that includes communications and descriptions of activities carried out on the topics covered by the journal.

Essays

It is intended for an argumentative text, which can be the presentation of a study or the development of a theme within the scope of the journal.

Critical reviews

Objective texts with critical analysis of published works, films and videos that have been published recently (last two years) and on the topics covered in the journal. The critical review should be 3 to 5 pages maximum. It must be unpublished.

Interviews

Interviews in the areas covered in this journal.

Announcement regarding submissions

As any scientific journal, Texto Livre has adopted some publication guidelines and the aim of this announcement is to reiterate such guidelines, which have been followed since our first issue. As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items.

The contribution is original, unpublished, and not currently under consideration by another journal; otherwise, it should be justified in "Comments for the editor". If the article is published in a preprint repository, inform the access identifier.

It should be noted that this rule only applies to the publication of articles published in other journals, the text may have appeared in other formats of publication provided such information is properly indicated as a footnote on the first page of the article, after its acceptance.

2. Submissions should be in an Openoffice file. Authors whose manuscript was composed in another word processor, should convert the file to ODT and make sure to review the document and check for conversion errors. For such conversion, we suggest that authors use of LibreOffice (http://pt-br.libreoffice.org/). More information about this requirement is available at http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Norma_brasileira. In addition to ABNT’s reference to the use of open standards, we would like to highlight that:

proprietary formats do not guarantee continuity of support which may result in partial or total data loss in the short or medium-term;
proprietary formats such as DOC or DOCX require the use of proprietary software, which may lead to the exclusion of any user unable to pay for software, or, alternatively, encourage the practice of piracy;
ODF (open document format) is a Brazilian standard for editable office documents and three states have passed legislation making its use mandatory (it is important to point out that this journal is sponsored by a public university, UFMG);
money saved by the use of open format and, consequently, free software, is donated to research funding;
long-term accessibility to the journal’s articles.

2. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

Papers submitted for review should not display the name of the authors.

Authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of aforementioned items, and submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines will be rejected. Referees and contributors should also comply with the guidelines and download OpenOffice to read the submitted manuscripts.

Historic

The journal is also known as Texto Livre: Linguagem e Tecnologia, but we have adopted the abbreviation Texto Livre (official name by the ISSN) in bibliographies, footnotes, references and bibliographic captions.

Texto Livre journal was established by the Texto Livre Group, now a research group registered in CNPq, which works with learning communities, research and development of open software since 2006. The journal's first edition was published in 2008 and was motivated by the need to include texts on open software research, which were very scarce at the time. Gradually, the journal, linked to the Faculty of Arts at UFMG, opened up to the study of the relationship between languages and technologies (computer-mediated language teaching, textual production, semiotics) and education emerged as another important axis in publications. Thus, the journal was defined as a space that welcomes interdisciplinarity, not only in the relationship between language, education and technologies, but the possible diversity that keeps a link with technologies.

Among the group's values, the journal is committed to open software (which mainly adds to the journal the search for freedom and collaboration), to open science (defence for: transparency, reuse of research data, reproducibility of results and methodologies , cooperation and responsibility) and with serious and quality research (contrary to a movement of predatory journals, which republish texts without evaluation and for money).

Complementary information:

Previously, the journal had another address: http://www.periodicos.letras.ufmg.br/index.php/textolivre/