About the Journal

El Outsider is an academic journal that disseminates critical analysis on political issues in the fields of International Relations and Political Science. The journal is published annually, free of charge, open access, and enjoys editorial freedom from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Subject to a double-blind peer-review process, El Outsider offers various opportunities for contributions to energize and disseminate knowledge within its editorial line.

All published content is compiled, edited, and reviewed by the Editorial Committee, composed of students and faculty from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (COCISOH) at USFQ.

The journal supports its authors by handling peer review, copyediting, typographical and style correction, layout, galley generation, indexing (LEXIS, Archive, ROAD, Crossref, Dialnet), and social media dissemination. All of these services are provided free of charge thanks to the support of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ).

The layout and design process for the journal is carried out by the publishing house USFQ PRESS and is overseen by the journal's Editorial Committee. Before publication, the final design and content of the journal will be approved by the Academic Committee and the publishing house USFQ PRESS. Due to its open access policy, all content is immediately and freely available after publication, thanks to the financial support of the publishing house USFQ PRESS and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ).

Articles and components of El Outsider have a DOI code that facilitates their identification after publication.

About the Editorial Policy

El Outsider promotes research focused on political analysis in its various dimensions: national, comparative, and international. While it recognizes the usefulness of related disciplines—such as history, sociology, law, economics, and communication—these should serve as supporting tools and not as the exclusive basis for the work.

Contributions must fall into one of the following categories:

1. Ecuadorian Politics and National Dynamics: research on institutions, actors, parties, electoral processes, social movements, and public policies in Ecuador.
2. International Relations and Global Security: analysis of foreign policy, regional integration, bilateral and multilateral relations, diplomacy, geopolitics, and international security phenomena such as terrorism, organized crime, and armed conflicts.
3. Comparative Politics and Political Regimes: comparative studies of democratic, authoritarian, and hybrid regimes; political parties, electoral systems, legislative and judicial institutions, citizenship, and human rights.
4. Communication, Politics, and Public Opinion: analysis of political discourse, electoral and governmental communication, the role of the media and social media, as well as phenomena such as disinformation, fake news, propaganda, and digital diplomacy.
5. Critical Studies of National and Global Politics: political analysis from critical and non-traditional perspectives, including decolonial, gender, queer, environmental, and development studies, as well as reflections on inequalities of power, representation, and resources.

Contributions should not be limited to bibliographic reviews, descriptive expositions, or historical accounts. The objective is for articles to present critical analyses that engage with current debates in International Relations and Political Science, and to present arguments, interpretations, or proposals supported by evidence and previous studies.

Regarding submission and evaluation

The Outsider is committed to disseminating novel, current, and relevant academic contributions to discussions in International Relations and Political Science. In this regard, the journal maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward plagiarism, academic dishonesty, and the submission of works generated by artificial intelligence tools. All submitted manuscripts will be subject to originality verification and must comply with the highest ethical standards.

All submitted contributions must adhere to the editorial policy and the published Guidelines for Authors. Papers that do not meet these criteria will not be considered for the evaluation process. The Editorial Committee reserves the right to return, reject, or request adjustments to manuscripts that do not adhere to the guidelines established herein.

Periodicity

The journal will publish one volume per year containing research articles that satisfactorily meet its internal requirements and processes. Since 2023, it has been published during the first five days of June.

Starting with the eleventh edition (2025-2026), opinion columns will be accepted, edited, and published monthly, with no closing or opening date.

Archiving Policy

The journal El Outsider is preserved in its digital repository in Internet Archive and in the serial archives of the library of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ. The articles and components of the journal are available in PDF format in its Archive account.

Open Access Policy and Licensing

The journal adopts the open access policy based on the principle of supporting and disseminating knowledge to the public for greater global exchange, promoting freedom and the development of our countries and facilitating access and dissemination of science and research.

1. As of 2020, all articles and components of El Outsider are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Under this license, the authors retain copyright on the material but allow any user to share, copy, redistribute, transmit and adapt the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes without providing additional permissions, provided that the credit of the original authorship of the work is adequately recognized, providing a link to the license, and indicating whether changes have been made.
2. This license supports El Outsider's mission as an open access journal. The license appears on all individual websites of the journal's articles and components.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The journal does not charge any type of fee for access to its contents, nor is there any charge for authors.

Publication Ethics and Plagiarim Detection

El Outsider adheres to the code of conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and its Guidelines of Good Practices. In addition, the journal is also subject to the USFQ Code of Honor and Coexistence. The journal expects authors to comply with its provisions, including issues of authorship, plagiarism, and image manipulation.

All manuscripts submitted for peer review in the journal El Outsider are inspected by anti-plagiarism programs, which are based on the Code of Honor and Coexistence of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ and COPE policies, which ensure the originality of academic and scientific works.

Therefore, programs such as Turnitin or Similarity Check are used, which analyze and compare the similarity or grammatical and orthotypographic coincidences of other works. This process guarantees that the papers are unpublished and ensures compliance with the journal's quality standards.

The journal acknowledges that generative artificial intelligence tools may be used as technical support for auxiliary tasks such as grammar correction, style improvement, or preliminary translation; however, their use does not replace the author's intellectual responsibility for the submitted content. Any substantive use of such tools must be expressly declared in the manuscript. The use of artificial intelligence for the fabrication or alteration of data, results, citations, or bibliographic references, as well as for the complete generation of the text without substantive academic intervention, is prohibited. Artificial intelligence tools may not be considered authors or co-authors. Reviewers must refrain from submitting unpublished manuscripts to external platforms that could compromise the confidentiality of the editorial process.

Likewise, the journal makes available to its authors, reviewers and members of the scientific community specific tools for plagiarism detection: Grammarly, Turnitin, iThenticate, Urkund, which make up a set of free and paid access interfaces that monitor the originality of any manuscript and allow plagiarism control.

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