Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Al Mu’azarah: Jurnal Pengabdian Kepada Masyarakat is committed to maintaining high standards of publication ethics, academic integrity, transparency, and responsible scholarly publishing. This Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement is developed with reference to the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and internationally recognized principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing.
This statement applies to all parties involved in the publication process, including authors, editors, reviewers, and the publisher. Al Mu’azarah is committed to preventing and addressing publication misconduct, including plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of data, duplicate or redundant publication, inappropriate authorship, citation manipulation, peer-review manipulation, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and unethical research or community engagement practices.
In handling suspected publication misconduct, authorship disputes, complaints and appeals, conflicts of interest, corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions, Al Mu’azarah follows relevant COPE principles, guidelines, and flowcharts where applicable.
Duties of Editors
Publication Decisions
The Editor-in-Chief and editorial team are responsible for determining whether submitted manuscripts are suitable for publication. Editorial decisions are based on scholarly quality, originality, methodological soundness, relevance to the journal's focus and scope, contribution to community engagement and development, research integrity, ethical compliance, and peer-review recommendations.
Editorial decisions must remain independent and must not be influenced by publication fees, commercial interests, institutional pressure, personal relationships, or other inappropriate considerations.
Fair and Impartial Evaluation
Editors evaluate manuscripts solely on their academic merit, originality, relevance, methodological quality, and scholarly contribution without discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, citizenship, institutional affiliation, geographic origin, political philosophy, or other personal characteristics.
Confidentiality
Editors and editorial staff must maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts. Information concerning a manuscript may only be disclosed to the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, editorial advisers, and the publisher where necessary.
Unpublished materials contained in submitted manuscripts must not be used by editors for personal research or advantage without the author's explicit written permission.
Conflicts of Interest
Editors must disclose and appropriately manage any conflict of interest that could affect, or reasonably be perceived to affect, editorial independence. Editors should recuse themselves from handling manuscripts where significant personal, professional, financial, institutional, or collaborative conflicts exist.
Handling Allegations of Misconduct
Editors are responsible for taking appropriate action when credible concerns regarding research, community engagement, or publication misconduct are raised before or after publication.
Where necessary, authors may be asked to provide explanations, original data, ethics documentation, evidence of community participation or consent, or other supporting materials. Cases will be handled fairly, confidentially, and in accordance with relevant COPE guidance.
Duties of Reviewers
Contribution to Editorial Decisions
Reviewers assist editors in making editorial decisions and help authors improve the scholarly quality, clarity, accuracy, methodological soundness, and relevance of their manuscripts through constructive academic feedback.
Promptness
A reviewer who considers themselves unqualified to assess a manuscript or who cannot complete the review within the required period should promptly inform the editor.
Confidentiality
All manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, reproduce, distribute, discuss, or use unpublished information contained in manuscripts for personal, professional, or competitive advantage.
Objectivity
Reviews must be conducted objectively, professionally, and constructively. Personal criticism of authors is inappropriate. Reviewers should provide clear scholarly arguments supporting their comments and recommendations.
Acknowledgement of Sources
Reviewers should identify relevant scholarly works that have not been appropriately acknowledged and should notify the editor if they identify substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript and other published or submitted works.
Conflicts of Interest
Reviewers must decline to review manuscripts where personal, professional, financial, institutional, collaborative, or competitive relationships may create a conflict of interest.
Detailed information regarding manuscript assessment and review procedures is available on the journal's Peer Review Process page.
Duties of Authors
Reporting Standards
Authors must provide an accurate and objective account of the community engagement or service activities reported in the manuscript. The background, methods, participants or community partners, implementation process, results, outcomes, evaluation, and conclusions must be presented truthfully and with sufficient information to enable scholarly evaluation.
Fraudulent, deliberately inaccurate, fabricated, falsified, or misleading statements constitute unethical publication behaviour and are unacceptable.
Originality and Plagiarism
Authors must ensure that submitted manuscripts represent original scholarly work and that ideas, words, data, figures, theories, or other materials derived from other sources are appropriately acknowledged and cited.
Plagiarism, self-plagiarism, inappropriate paraphrasing, unattributed text recycling, and the use of another person's ideas or materials without proper acknowledgment are unacceptable publication practices.
All submitted manuscripts are subject to similarity and plagiarism screening in accordance with the journal's dedicated Plagiarism Screening Policy.
Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Publication
Authors must not submit substantially the same manuscript simultaneously to more than one journal. Duplicate or redundant publication without appropriate disclosure constitutes unethical publication behaviour.
Authors should disclose closely related manuscripts or publications that substantially overlap with the submitted work.
Authorship and Contributorship
Authorship should accurately reflect substantial scholarly contributions to the community engagement activity and preparation of the manuscript.
All listed authors should have made meaningful contributions to the conception, design, implementation, evaluation, analysis, interpretation, or preparation of the work; participated in drafting or critically revising the manuscript; approved the final version; and accepted responsibility for the integrity of the work.
Guest authorship, gift authorship, honorary authorship, and ghost authorship are unacceptable.
Individuals who contributed to the activity or manuscript but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be appropriately acknowledged.
Authorship disputes will be handled in accordance with relevant COPE guidance and may be referred to the authors' institutions where appropriate.
Acknowledgement of Sources
Authors must appropriately acknowledge all sources that have materially influenced their work. References must be genuine, relevant, accurate, and used for legitimate scholarly purposes.
Data Integrity and Availability
Authors are responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and appropriate presentation of all data and evidence reported in their manuscripts. Data, participant information, community responses, outcomes, documentation, or other evidence must not be fabricated, falsified, selectively manipulated, or presented in a misleading manner.
Where necessary for editorial assessment or investigation of ethical concerns, authors may be requested to provide underlying data, activity documentation, or other supporting evidence, subject to applicable ethical, legal, privacy, and confidentiality requirements.
Fundamental Errors in Published Works
If authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their published article, they must promptly notify the journal and cooperate with the editors in issuing an appropriate correction or retraction where necessary.
Research Ethics and Ethical Oversight
Community engagement activities involving individuals, groups, institutions, or vulnerable populations must respect applicable ethical principles. Authors are responsible for obtaining ethical approval and informed consent where required and for protecting participants' and community partners' rights, dignity, safety, privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality.
Authors must also ensure that community participation is represented accurately and that photographs, quotations, personal information, or other identifiable materials are used only with appropriate permission or consent.
Detailed requirements regarding ethical approval, exemptions, informed consent, vulnerable participants, and supporting documentation are provided in the journal's Ethical Clearance policy.
Conflicts of Interest
Authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose any financial, professional, institutional, personal, or other interests that could influence, or reasonably be perceived to influence, their scholarly judgment.
Authors must also disclose relevant funding or sponsorship and, where applicable, the role of funders, partner institutions, or sponsors in the design, implementation, evaluation, interpretation, manuscript preparation, or publication of the community engagement activity.
Data Fabrication and Falsification
Fabrication refers to creating data, participants, activities, observations, outcomes, or results that did not occur. Falsification refers to manipulating materials, processes, documentation, images, data, or results in a manner that misrepresents the actual community engagement activity.
Both fabrication and falsification constitute serious misconduct and may result in manuscript rejection, correction, retraction, or referral to the relevant institution or authority.
Citation Ethics
Authors must ensure that all references are genuine, relevant, accurate, and appropriately used.
The following practices are prohibited:
- fabricating references or citing nonexistent sources;
- deliberately providing inaccurate bibliographic information;
- inserting irrelevant citations;
- excessive or inappropriate self-citation;
- citation coercion;
- citation cartels or reciprocal citation arrangements intended primarily to manipulate citation metrics; and
- other forms of citation manipulation.
Editors and reviewers must not require authors to add unnecessary citations to their own publications or to the journal.
Peer-Review Integrity
Al Mu’azarah is committed to maintaining a fair, independent, confidential, and objective peer-review process. Any attempt to manipulate reviewer identities, recommendations, reviewer accounts, or the editorial evaluation process constitutes serious publication misconduct.
Detailed procedures are described on the journal's Peer Review Process page.
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
The use of generative artificial intelligence and AI-assisted technologies by authors, reviewers, and editors must comply with the journal's dedicated Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy.
All parties remain responsible for maintaining transparency, confidentiality, accuracy, intellectual integrity, and human accountability when using AI-assisted technologies.
Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern
Al Mu’azarah is committed to preserving the accuracy and integrity of the scholarly record. Post-publication concerns will be assessed fairly and, where appropriate, in accordance with relevant COPE guidance.
Corrections
A correction may be issued when an error affects part of a published article but does not invalidate its principal findings or overall scholarly integrity.
Retractions
A retraction may be issued when there is reliable evidence that published findings or reported activities are substantially unreliable because of serious error or misconduct, plagiarism, redundant publication, unethical community engagement, manipulated peer review, fabricated or falsified data, or other serious violations of publication ethics.
A retraction notice should clearly identify the affected article and explain the reason for the retraction.
Expressions of Concern
An Expression of Concern may be issued when serious concerns have been raised regarding a published article but sufficient evidence for a final editorial decision is not yet available.
Complaints and Appeals
Al Mu’azarah recognizes the right of authors, reviewers, readers, community partners, and other parties to raise legitimate complaints regarding editorial procedures, peer review, publication ethics, conflicts of interest, editorial conduct, or published content.
Authors may appeal an editorial decision where they believe that a significant factual, procedural, or ethical error has occurred. Appeals should provide clear scholarly or procedural justification.
Complaints and appeals will be handled objectively, confidentially, and in accordance with relevant COPE principles.
Allegations of Research and Publication Misconduct
Allegations of research, community engagement, or publication misconduct will be treated seriously, fairly, and confidentially.
The journal will seek appropriate evidence and provide relevant parties with an opportunity to respond. Where institutional investigation is necessary, the journal may contact the author's institution, research ethics committee, funding body, community partner, or another competent authority.
The journal will avoid unsupported accusations and will follow appropriate COPE guidance when managing allegations of misconduct.
Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Licensing
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their manuscripts respect applicable intellectual property rights and that permission has been obtained where copyrighted or otherwise protected materials are reproduced.
Copyright ownership, author rights, reuse permissions, and licensing terms are governed by the journal's dedicated Copyright Notice and Licensing policies.
Open Access, Archiving, and Journal Transparency
Al Mu’azarah is committed to transparent and responsible scholarly publishing. The journal's policies regarding access, preservation, funding, advertising, and direct marketing are available on the following dedicated pages:
Duties of the Publisher
The publisher supports the editorial independence of Al Mu’azarah and does not interfere with scholarly decisions regarding the acceptance or rejection of individual manuscripts.
The publisher supports the editorial team in maintaining the integrity and preservation of the scholarly record and in responding appropriately to allegations of research, community engagement, or publication misconduct.
Information regarding journal ownership, management, and editorial independence is provided on the Ownership and Management page.
Editorial Independence
Editorial decisions are based solely on academic and scholarly considerations.
Article Processing Charges (APCs), sponsorship, advertising, institutional interests, commercial considerations, or other financial factors must not influence editorial decisions.
Payment of any publication-related fee does not guarantee acceptance of a manuscript.
Post-Publication Discussion
Al Mu’azarah welcomes responsible scholarly discussion concerning published articles.
Readers, authors, or community partners who identify significant errors, ethical concerns, or potential threats to research or community integrity may contact the editorial office. Legitimate concerns will be assessed and, where necessary, investigated in accordance with the journal's publication ethics procedures and relevant COPE guidance.
