About the Journal

Aim and scope

The Revista UniNorte de Medicina y Ciencias de la Salud (online ISSN 3134-7835; print ISSN 2415-0614) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of the Universidad del Norte (Paraguay). It is rooted in the joint work of the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Health Sciences, and is published by the Editorial de la Universidad del Norte. Its purpose is to disseminate rigorous research in the health sciences and related fields, to support education and clinical practice in Paraguay and the region, and to give visibility to the scientific output of its academic community.

The journal publishes original articles from basic, clinical, epidemiological, applied, and technological research, as well as reviews and other contributions that provide useful evidence for understanding health, disease, and health care. It welcomes quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, and disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary approaches. It is aimed at researchers, health professionals, faculty, and undergraduate and graduate students.

Editorial experience

Peer review is complemented by professional editorial production oriented to digital dissemination. Accepted articles are typeset and published online with a DOI. On this OJS platform, articles are offered as PDF and EPUB, so they can be archived, printed, or read on different devices.

Technological transparency

The journal allows the use of artificial intelligence tools to support editorial or writing tasks—translation, grammar checking, or text organisation, among others—always under the full responsibility of authors and editors.

No AI-generated or AI-processed content is published without verification and final validation by members of the editorial team (human-in-the-loop). Peer review and decisions to accept or reject are carried out exclusively by human experts. If authors used AI in preparing the work, they must declare it explicitly (tool and purpose). AI tools cannot be listed as authors.

Peer review and timelines

Manuscripts that pass the initial editorial screen undergo double-blind external peer review. In principle, each submission is evaluated by at least two independent reviewers. The estimated timeline for that stage is 4 to 12 weeks, depending on reviewer availability and manuscript type. Once a paper is accepted, online production and publication are completed when copyediting and typesetting are finished.

Integrity and ethics

The journal follows the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) regarding conflicts of interest, authorship, disputes, and post-publication corrections or retractions. All submissions undergo originality screening. Manuscripts with unacceptable uncited similarity, or evidence of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, redundant publication, or data manipulation, may be rejected without external review. Research involving humans or animals must comply with international ethical principles, including the Declaration of Helsinki.

Article types

Operational requirements live in each section on the Submissions page, next to the submission link. In brief:

  • Open: original articles, reviews, case reports, short communications, and letters to the editor.
  • By invitation or editorial: perspectives and editorials.

Publication and access

The journal publishes three issues per year within an annual volume. Within each issue, publication is continuous: articles appear online individually as soon as the editorial process is complete, without waiting to close the full fascicle.

Issue 1 covers January–April; issue 2, May–August; and issue 3, September–December. Any article whose publication date falls within one of those periods is included in the corresponding issue. Orientative issue closures coincide with the end of each four-month period (end of April, August, and December).

This combines immediate dissemination —article by article, with DOI— with a clear issue structure useful for citation, indexing, and archiving. As a reference for the current cycle: Vol. 15 No. 1 (2026, January–April), Vol. 15 No. 2 (2026, May–August), and Vol. 15 No. 3 (2026, September–December, now opening).

History

The journal has been published since 2012. In its first stage it appeared in print (ISSN 2415-0614); part of that legacy also circulated as PDFs on the website of the Directorate of Research and Engagement with the Environment. Since 2020 publication has been exclusively online (online ISSN 3134-7835), with DOIs and a home on this platform. The OJS archive begins with Volume 9 (2020); earlier volumes belong to the prior print and institutional stage.

All content is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0): authors retain their rights, and readers may read, download, copy, distribute, and reuse the work with appropriate attribution of authorship and source.

Open access

The journal operates under a diamond open access model. Publication is free of charge for authors: there are no submission, review, or article processing charges (APCs) at any stage. That model expresses the commitment of the Universidad del Norte and its press to equitable, accessible science.

Preservation

The journal maintains its own digital preservation policy for content published on this platform. In OJS distribution settings, the distributed archiving mechanisms LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) are enabled, so that participating nodes can preserve and, where applicable, restore issues over the long term.

In addition, each article receives a DOI with deposit in Zenodo (prefix 10.5281), providing an archival copy with persistent metadata independent of the site’s immediate availability. Public reading and download formats are PDF and EPUB.

This policy will be updated if enrolment or deposit status in the preservation networks changes.

Diversity and academic contribution

The journal fosters diversity of authorship, institutions, and geographic origins, aiming to avoid excessive concentration of contributions from a single author or research group and to sustain academic plurality. At the same time, it documents and disseminates research from the Faculties of Medicine and of Health Sciences and from the wider scientific community, so that this output is discoverable, citable, and reusable. In doing so it strengthens higher education, evidence-based practice, and a scientific culture grounded in ethics, open access, and social impact.

Details of directories, aggregators, and the indexing plan —including indexes not yet achieved— are published on the site’s Indexing page.