In order to uphold the highest standards of scholarly publishing and to ensure transparency, fairness, and integrity in all aspects of its publication process, Javanologi: International Journal of Javanese Studies adopts ethical policies aligned with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE Core Practices).

1. Authorship and Contributorship

• Authorship Criteria: Authorship is strictly limited to individuals who have made substantial intellectual contributions to the study design, data collection, philological/cultural analysis, drafting, or critical revision of the manuscript. All listed authors must review and approve the final version prior to submission. For further reference, see COPE Guidelines on Authorship.
• Non-Author Contributors: Contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship (e.g., technical assistants, language polishers, or institutional supporters) must be listed in the Acknowledgments section. Guest, gift, or ghost authorship is strictly prohibited.
• Prior Publication: Submissions must be original work. Submitting manuscripts containing material previously published elsewhere requires explicit disclosure and written consent from the Editor-in-Chief.

2. Editorial and Peer Review Process

• Objectivity and Merit: Manuscripts are evaluated solely on their academic merit, scientific rigor, historical accuracy, and relevance to Javanese studies through a double-blind peer-review process, free from commercial, personal, or institutional bias, adhering to COPE Peer Review Principles.
• Confidentiality & Conflict Declaration: Editors and peer reviewers must maintain absolute confidentiality regarding all submitted manuscripts. Reviewers and editors must recuse themselves from evaluating manuscripts in which they have competing interests or conflicts of interest.
• Author Responsibilities: Authors are expected to engage constructively with reviewer feedback and submit necessary revisions within the designated timeframe.

3. Conflict of Interest

• Mandatory Disclosure: All authors, peer reviewers, and editorial board members must explicitly disclose any financial, personal, academic, or professional conflicts of interest that could influence the research findings or editorial evaluation, in line with COPE Guidance on Competing Interests.
• Recusal: Conflicted editors or reviewers will be recused from the decision-making process for the specific manuscript concerned.
• Funding Acknowledgement: All sources of financial support, grant numbers, and institutional affiliations must be clearly acknowledged within the manuscript.

4. Ethical Oversight of Research

• Human Subjects and Fieldwork Ethics: Research involving human participants, ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with indigenous informants, or sensitive cultural data must comply with institutional ethical guidelines and obtain appropriate ethical clearance (Ethical Clearance/IRB approval), following COPE Ethical Oversight Standards.
• Informed Consent & Cultural Sensitivity: Informed consent from research participants or informants must be documented. Respect for local customs, sacred cultural knowledge, and community privacy must be demonstrated.

5. Data Availability and Reproducibility

• Data Sharing: Authors are encouraged to make underlying research data, field notes, interview transcripts, or analytical scripts publicly available to support verification and academic reproducibility, in accordance with COPE Data and Reproducibility Principles.
• Restricted Data Justification: If data sharing is restricted due to participant privacy, cultural sensitivity, copyright, or legal constraints, authors must explicitly justify these limitations in a "Data Availability Statement" within the manuscript.

6. Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Licensing

• Originality: Submissions must be original works that have not been published previously and are not currently under consideration by any other journal.
• Permissions: Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate permissions for reproducing copyrighted materials (such as photographs of ancient manuscripts, historical maps, illustrations, or extensive text excerpts). Refer to COPE Intellectual Property Guidelines.
• Open Access: Articles are published under an open-access license (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International / CC BY 4.0), permitting unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

7. Handling Complaints, Appeals, Corrections, and Retractions

• Complaints & Appeals Procedure: Javanologi maintains clear procedures for authors wishing to appeal editorial decisions or submit formal complaints regarding the publication process. Appeals are reviewed impartially by the Editor-in-Chief or designated independent board members following COPE Guidelines on Handling Complaints and Appeals.
• Corrections and Expressions of Concern: Post-publication errors, minor omissions, or honest mistakes that do not invalidate the core findings are addressed promptly via formal Errata or Corrigenda. In cases of ongoing investigations into potential misconduct, an Expression of Concern may be published.
• Retractions: Articles containing major invalidating errors, unsubstantiated data, severe plagiarism, or unethical research practices will be retracted in accordance with the COPE Retraction Guidelines and guided by COPE Flowcharts. Retracted articles will remain publicly accessible on the journal platform marked with a clear "RETRACTED" watermark, accompanied by a formal Notice of Retraction explaining the specific grounds for retraction.

8. Research Misconduct and Initial Assessment

Prohibited Conduct: Javanologi maintains a zero-tolerance policy for research misconduct, including plagiarism, data fabrication/falsification, duplicate submission, citation manipulation, image manipulation, and peer review tampering, aligned with COPE Allegations of Misconduct Guidelines.

Initial Assessment Process: When allegations or indications of misconduct arise (pre- or post-publication), the Editorial Board conducts a thorough Initial Assessment. This involves:

1. Conducting preliminary fact-checking and automated similarity/plagiarism screenings.
2. Examining raw data, source materials, or primary archival documents.
3. Evaluating the credibility and gravity of the concern before determining whether to contact the authors for a formal explanation or escalate the matter to the authors' home institution or ethics board per COPE protocols and flowcharts.

9. Post-Publication Discussion and Communication

• Post-Publication Commentary: Javanologi encourages active scholarly debate and post-publication discourse, in line with COPE Post-Publication Discussions Guidance. Readers, researchers, and scholars are invited to submit post-publication commentaries, academic rebuttals, or letters to the Editor.
• Submission Channel: All post-publication inquiries, academic commentaries, or reports of potential ethical breaches must be submitted directly via email to the editorial office at javanologijournal@mail.uns.ac.id.
• Right of Reply: The journal facilitates fair, constructive dialogue by giving original authors the opportunity to submit a formal response/rebuttal, which may be published alongside the commentary after peer review.

10. Business Model, Open Access, and Editorial Independence

• Non-Commercial Business Model: Javanologi operates as a non-commercial, open-access journal published by Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS).
• No Author Fees: The journal charges no Article Processing Charges (APCs), no submission fees, and no publication fees. All accepted articles are made freely available to the public without paywalls or subscription barriers.
• Editorial Independence: Editorial decision-making is strictly independent of publisher management, institutional administration, commercial considerations, or financial influences. Decisions to accept or reject manuscripts are based solely on peer review recommendations and scientific quality.

Javanologi: International Journal of Javanese Studies does not charge any fees for manuscript submission, processing, or publication. All stages of the editorial and publishing process are provided free of charge to authors.

Important Notice on Fraud Prevention

Authors and readers are advised to be cautious of any individuals or entities falsely claiming to represent Javanologi: International Journal of Javanese Studies and requesting payments. All official communication from the journal is conducted through our verified contact channels. If you receive suspicious messages or requests for payment, please contact us directly at javanologijournal@mail.uns.ac.id to verify their authenticity.

How Plagiarism is Handled:
Submissions are evaluated and processed based on the total percentage of similarity detected:

The papers published in Javanologi: International Journal of Javanese Studies will be considered for retraction if:

1. They have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of major error (e.g., miscalculation or experimental error), or as a result of fabrication (e.g., of data) or falsification (e.g., image manipulation);
2. It constitutes plagiarism;
3. The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper attribution to previous sources or disclosure to the editor, permission to republish, or justification (i.e., cases of redundant publication);
4. It contains material or data without authorisation for use;
5. Copyright has been infringed or there is some other serious legal issue (e.g., libel, privacy);
6. It reports unethical research;
7. It has been published solely on the basis of a compromised or manipulated peer review process;
8. The author(s) failed to disclose a major competing interest (a.k.a. conflict of interest) that, in the view of the editor, would have unduly affected interpretations of the work or recommendations by editors and peer reviewers.

The mechanism of retraction follows the Retraction Guidelines of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4

This policy outlines the official stance of Javanologi: International Journal of Javanese Studies regarding the ethical, responsible, and transparent use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technologies (including Large Language Models, Generative AI, and digital image processors) in the preparation and evaluation of submitted manuscripts. This policy is developed in alignment with the guidelines set forth in COPE's position and resource focus on Artificial Intelligence. As an international scholarly journal dedicated to the study of Javanese culture, language, literature, history, art, and society, Javanologi is committed to upholding the highest standards of academic integrity, historical accuracy, philological rigor, and ethical research practices.

1. Authorship and Accountability

• AI Cannot Be an Author: AI tools and Generative AI software do not meet the legal or ethical criteria for authorship. They cannot take moral or legal responsibility for the content, accuracy, integrity, or originality of the research. Therefore, AI tools cannot be listed or credited as an author or co-author on any manuscript submitted to Javanologi.
• Full Author Responsibility: Authors remain solely and fully accountable for the entire content of their manuscript, including any text, translation, data, or visual components generated, edited, or polished using AI tools. Authors must independently verify the factual correctness, citations, primary sources, and interpretations generated or assisted by AI.
• Human Oversight Required: The application of AI tools must remain under strict human critical evaluation. Authors must review, cross-check, and refine all AI outputs to ensure compliance with scholarly standards, historical fidelity, and ethical guidelines.

2. Permissible Uses (With Mandatory Disclosure)

AI tools may be utilized as supporting assistants during manuscript preparation under the condition that their use is explicitly disclosed. Permissible uses include:

• Language and Grammar Refinement: Enhancing readability, spelling, grammar, and stylistic structure in English or Indonesian.
• Manuscript Structuring: Assisting in organizing sections and formatting layout, provided that Generative AI does not compose substantive scholarly arguments or replace human intellectual analysis.
• Translation and Transliteration Assistance: Assisting with preliminary translation between languages (e.g., Javanese, Old Javanese/Kawi, Dutch, Indonesian, English) or initial transliteration of Javanese script (Aksara Jawa). (Note on Low-Resource Languages: Due to frequent AI hallucinations and inaccuracies in processing low-resource languages and historical scripts, authors are strictly required to perform manual philological verification against primary sources).
• Literature Exploration & Synthesis Support: Aiding in mapping relevant literature or organizing bibliographic entries, provided all citations and summaries are manually verified against the original publication sources.
• Data Organization and Visualization: Assisting in organizing field notes, creating charts, or generating structural diagrams, provided raw data is not fabricated or misrepresented.

3. Prohibited Uses

The following practices constitute severe violations of academic integrity and are strictly prohibited in Javanologi:

• Substitution of Core Intellectual Contribution: AI must not be used to perform the core scholarly work of the study, such as formulating original hypotheses, conducting philological analyses, interpreting cultural/historical phenomena, or drawing scholarly conclusions.
• Fabrication and Hallucination: Generating non-existent primary or secondary references, archival sources, historical dates, informant quotes, or research data.
• Plagiarism and Unattributed Paraphrasing: Using AI to reproduce, rewrite, or paraphrase existing scholarly work without proper attribution to the original authors.
• Manipulation of Primary Visual Sources and Manuscripts: Generative AI must not be used to alter, manipulate, reconstruct, or artificially enhance digital images of primary research artifacts—such as ancient manuscripts (naskah kuno), inscriptions (prasasti), historical photographs, or field artifacts—where such modifications alter the authentic visual evidence. Digital reconstruction is permitted only when it is the explicit, central methodology of the research and is fully described as such.
• Breach of Confidentiality and Fieldwork Ethics: Authors must not upload unpublished manuscript drafts, confidential interview transcripts, or sensitive/sacred indigenous knowledge into public AI platforms where data privacy, copyright, or informant confidentiality could be compromised.

4. Peer Review and Editorial Confidentiality

To protect intellectual property, indigenous cultural rights, and reviewer objectivity:

• Reviewers: Peer reviewers are strictly forbidden from uploading submitted manuscript drafts, abstracts, or any portion of unpublished submissions into public AI platforms or LLMs for evaluation, summarization, or report generation.
• Editors: Editors shall not feed submitted manuscripts into AI platforms for processing or decision-making.

5. Consequences of Policy Violation

Failure to adhere to this policy will be treated as a serious breach of publication ethics under COPE guidelines. Violations detected before or after publication may result in:

1. Immediate rejection of the submitted manuscript.
2. Formal retraction of the article (if already published).
3. Temporary or permanent ban of the author(s) from submitting work to Javanologi.
4. Formal notification to the author’s home institution or relevant academic ethics boards.

6. Generative AI for Visual Reconstruction of Unvisualized Cultural Content (Strict Special Exception)

As a general publishing rule, AI-generated images or visual artworks are strictly prohibited. A rare, highly regulated exception is granted solely for manuscripts addressing Javanese cultural heritage, oral traditions, folklore, or ancient manuscripts (naskah kuna) that completely lack any pre-existing visual, historical, or pictorial references across all known media.

• Editorial & Peer Review Evaluation: The inclusion of AI-generated imagery is subject to rigorous editorial assessment and peer review. Images will be rejected if they do not provide indispensable analytical or contextual value that significantly elevates the scholarly quality of the manuscript. Authors must explicitly justify why the visual representation cannot be sourced through traditional photographic, archival, or human-rendered methods.
• Academic Integrity & Disclosure Requirements:AI-generated images must strictly be designated as "Hypothetical Visual Reconstructions" and must never be presented as empirical evidence or historical artifacts. Authors utilizing this exception must:
  • Fully disclose the exact text prompts, AI software/model versioning, and parameter settings used to generate the image.
  • Demonstrate a rigorous manual, historical, or philological verification process ensuring the generated visual does not introduce cultural hallucinations, anachronisms, or iconographic inaccuracies.
  • Explicitly state the hypothetical nature of the visualization in both the figure caption and the mandatory AI Disclosure Statement.

7. Policy Updates

The editorial team of Javanologi: International Journal of Javanese Studies will periodically review and update this policy to align with technological advances in Generative AI and evolving ethical standards in global humanities publishing.