OAIJSS applies the ICMJE authorship criteria. Authorship is a statement of both credit and accountability: everyone listed must be able to answer for the work, and everyone who qualifies must be listed. Single-author manuscripts are welcome.
1. Who qualifies as an author
Authorship requires all four of the following. Meeting only some of them does not confer authorship.
- Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the data;
- drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
- final approval of the version to be published;
- agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including its integrity and accuracy, and willingness to help resolve questions raised after publication.
Each author must be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for which parts of the work, and must have confidence in the integrity of their co-authors' contributions.
2. Who does not qualify
Contributions that do not meet all four criteria are recognised in the Acknowledgements, with the nature of the contribution stated and the written permission of the person named. These commonly include:
- acquisition of funding alone;
- general supervision of a research group, department or faculty, or seniority alone;
- providing access to a field site, community, archive, dataset or respondents alone;
- routine data entry, transcription, coding, interviewing or translation alone;
- language editing, statistical consultation or research assistance alone, which must additionally be disclosed by name and affiliation.
3. Contributor roles
Every submission must include a contributorship statement naming what each author did, using the CRediT taxonomy where applicable: conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, writing (original draft), writing (review and editing), visualization, supervision, project administration and funding acquisition. The statement is published with the article.
4. Corresponding author
- Confirms that every listed author meets the criteria in section 1 and that no qualifying contributor has been omitted.
- Confirms that all authors have seen and approved the submitted version and every revision.
- Communicates with the journal during review, revision and production, and checks the galley proof.
- Remains available after publication to respond to queries, including requests for data or clarification.
- Ensures the declarations of funding, competing interests, ethics approval, consent and data availability are complete and accurate.
5. Author identity and affiliation
For each author the submission must state the full name as it should be cited, the institutional affiliation held at the time the work was carried out, the country, and an active ORCID iD. An author with a joint appointment lists each institution. A job title or employment status — “lecturer”, “staff”, “research assistant” — is not part of an affiliation and should not be entered in the affiliation field.
Names must be entered in the correct fields: given name and family name separately. Where a name has several elements, the author decides which element is the family name; it must not be left blank, and a compound name must not be placed entirely in the given-name field. Authors with a single name (mononym) enter it in the family-name field. Each author should write their name and affiliation consistently across all their OAIJSS articles, using the same spelling of the unit, institution and city each time, because consistent metadata is a condition of accurate indexing, citation matching and national accreditation assessment.
6. Changes to authorship
Before acceptance. A request to add, remove or reorder authors must come from the corresponding author, state the reason and the contribution that justifies it, and be accompanied by the written agreement of every author, including the person being added or removed. The editor may request further evidence and may decline a change that is not substantiated.
After acceptance or publication. Changes are exceptional. Where justified, the change is made through a published corrigendum stating what changed and why. Authorship is never changed silently.
7. Group and collaborative authorship
Where a study is conducted by a group, the submission must state whether authorship is attributed to the group name, to named individuals on behalf of the group, or both. Individuals credited as authors must each meet the four criteria; other members are listed in the Acknowledgements, and the corresponding author provides the full membership list for publication.
8. Deceased or incapacitated authors
An author who qualified but has died or become incapacitated before submission remains listed, with a footnote recording this. The corresponding author confirms the contribution and, where possible, obtains the agreement of the next of kin or the institution.
9. Artificial intelligence cannot be an author
Generative-AI tools, large language models and chatbots cannot be listed as authors or co-authors, because they cannot consent to submission, approve the final version or take responsibility for the work. Material use of such tools must be disclosed as set out in the Publication Ethics policy, and the authors remain fully responsible for everything in the manuscript.
10. Prohibited authorship practices
- Gift or honorary authorship — listing a person who did not meet the criteria, as a courtesy or because of seniority.
- Guest authorship — adding a well-known name to improve the prospects of acceptance.
- Ghost authorship — omitting a person who did meet the criteria, including an undisclosed professional writer.
- Trading in authorship — offering, buying or selling authorship, or obtaining a manuscript from a paper mill.
- Adding or removing an author without the agreement of all authors.
Any of these is treated as misconduct under the Publication Ethics policy and may lead to rejection, correction, retraction or notification of the authors' institutions.
11. Authorship disputes
OAIJSS is not the body competent to adjudicate who contributed what. Where a dispute arises, the editor suspends processing of the manuscript, or publishes an expression of concern if the article is already published, and refers the matter to the institutions of the authors concerned. The journal acts on the published record once the institutions have reached a conclusion, following the applicable COPE flowchart. Authors are asked to settle authorship among themselves before submission.
12. Declaration at submission
By submitting to OAIJSS, the corresponding author declares on behalf of all authors that the authorship list is complete and correct, that every listed author meets the four criteria, that all authors have approved the submission, that the work is not under consideration elsewhere, and that all competing interests and funding sources have been declared.
Questions about authorship on a specific manuscript should be sent to indonesiajournalsocialsciences@gmail.com before submission.