Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

Komunikator is an open-access academic journal for interdisciplinary digital media research and communication-based production. The journal primarily addresses the influence of digital technologies on communication processes, media production and consumption use, and societal change.

The journal covers Communication and Digital Technology, which addresses how digital technologies, such as the Internet, social media, and modern communication devices, affect communication. Topics may include changes in how information is disseminated, how social interactions occur through digital platforms, the impact of digital technologies on traditional media, and issues such as privacy, data security, and ethics in digital communication.

Social Media and Digital Content addresses various aspects of social media use and the production and distribution of digital content. Topics typically include The Role of Social Media in Communication, Digital Marketing Strategy, Social and Cultural Impact, Content Quality and Ethics, Monetization and the Creator Economy, Analytics and Algorithms, Digital Marketing and Advertising Communication, Digital Marketing Strategy, Online Advertising, and Content Marketing.

Ethics and Policy in Digital Media covers various aspects related to moral responsibility, ethical principles, and regulations governing the use of digital media.

Digital Culture and Society covers various aspects that describe how digital technology and the internet affect social life, cultural values, and human interactions, including cultural transformation, digital identity, and online social spaces.

Innovation in Digital Media and Communication covers new developments, technologies, and creative approaches that change how media is produced, distributed, and consumed and how communication occurs in the digital age. We welcome manuscripts that make important theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions to digital media and communication.

 

Section Policies

Articles

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed
 

Open Access Policy

Komunikator provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This journal is open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to users or / institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full text articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or author. This is in accordance with Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefits for all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers, especially the price barriers, that stand in the way. The more who join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access.

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

While  the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination. With such an opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions. Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or utopian.

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies. 

I.  Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.

II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.


Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars themselves, immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.

The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish.

February 14, 2002
Budapest, Hungary

Leslie Chan: Bioline International
Darius Cuplinskas: Director, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Michael Eisen: Public Library of Science
Fred Friend: Director Scholarly Communication, University College London
Yana Genova: Next Page Foundation
Jean-Claude Guédon: University of Montreal
Melissa Hagemann: Program Officer, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Stevan Harnad: Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, Universite du Quebec a Montreal
Rick Johnson: Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Rima Kupryte: Open Society Institute
Manfredi La Manna: Electronic Society for Social Scientists 
István Rév: Open Society Institute, Open Society Archives
Monika Segbert: eIFL Project consultant 
Sidnei de Souza: Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International
Peter Suber: Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College & The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
Jan Velterop: Publisher, BioMed Central

 

Peer Review Process

Every article that goes to the editorial staff will be selected through Initial Review processes by the Editorial Board. Then, the manuscript will be sent to at least two anonymous reviewers (Double Blind Peer Review). After that, the articles will be returned to the authors for revise. In each manuscript, peer reviewers will be rated from the substantial and technical aspects. Peer reviewer that collaborate with Komunikator is the experts in media review, whether print, electronic and new media and various issues of intercultural and democratic communication. They were experienced in the prestigious journal management and publication that was spread around the national and abroad.

 

Publication Frequency

Komunikator was published by Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, it is published twice a year in May and November. Starting from the issuance of Vol 15 No 1 (2023), Komunikator changes the number of published manuscripts from 10 manuscripts per edition.

 

Publication Ethics

This statement is to clarify the ethical behavior and legal standards of all parties involved in the publishing process of Komunikator, including authors, editorial board members, reviewers, and publishers. This journal expects all parties to understand this ethical policy before submitting or accepting to review a manuscript. It frowns at and will not tolerate any form of copyright abuse or publishing malpractice. This is in accordance with our commitment and determination to prevent ethical misconduct which we recognize as a growing problem in academic and publishing circles. This statement is based on COPE's Core Practices (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices).

Duties of Authors

Authors of Komunikator should submit an original work which has not been published and is equally not under the consideration of other journals or publishers. Original paper means the article is not only repeating the previous work. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical conduct. It is unacceptable.

The report of an original research paper should be presented in detail and accurately. It uses citation or quotation properly when replicating the work, ideas, and/or words of others to minimize the possibilities of plagiarism and other research fraud including data fabrication and falsification. It is mostly discovered in the practice of modifying results, the sources, and improper interpretation of the observation to make a convincing elaboration.

The corresponding author should inform the editor once they find significant errors or inaccuracy in their publication to make a retraction or correction. When necessary, the author must disclose the data to the editor during the process of review for the accuracy of the report.

Proper acknowledgment of people involved must always be made. If they have made a significant or substantial contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported research, they should be listed as co-authors. The corresponding author has a responsibility to ensure that those co-authors have agreed to submit their work for publication. The corresponding author must also disclose any sources of funding and declare that it would not influence the result of the report.

Political and behavioral studies sometimes involve human subjects. If the manuscript contains this method, it is unethical for the author to exploit and/or disclose any confidential data or information on the human subject.

Duties of Editors

Editors are responsible for an initial review of a manuscript to evaluate the originality and do the first screening of any practices of research fraud. During the review, an editor must only consider the content of the article regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the author. Any information related to the author and unpublished material treated as a confidential document must not be shared to other people outside the publishing process of the article or used for the editor's own research without the written consent of the author.

The editor is responsible to fairly and wisely select the peer-reviewer who has sufficient expertise and avoid those with conflict of interest. On the other hand, the editor must disclose or refrain from assuming this responsibility if he/she becomes a subject of this issue.

The editorial board has the responsibility to make decisions about the publication of an article. However, if there is evidence of research fraud such as plagiarism, copyright infringement, or libel, editors have the right to contact the author to justify and confirm the data in their article. This right and responsibility are given to the editorial board in order to have a guarantee of an ethical and high-quality article.

Duties of Reviewers

Reviewers or advisory board is a group of people who are assisting the editorial board in making decisions and improving the quality of articles at the same time. Therefore, reviewers play an important role in any scientific journal publication.

A reviewer must provide high-quality feedback on the manuscript assigned to them. It must be constructive, clearly stated, with supporting arguments or references. The review process must be conducted objectively such that the reviewer's personal criticisms to the author should not mark the work.

Any selected reviewer who feels unqualified or cannot provide feedback in a timely manner should notify the editors and excuse himself/herself from the review process. Therefore, if she/he wants to pass the manuscript to their colleague to review, they must have the editor's permission beforehand.

Reviewers should declare any competing interests to the editor before accepting to review or during the review process. They should decline from reviewing if it generates a competitive, collaborative or other relationship challenges with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

All information during the peer-review process must be kept confidential and must not be taken advantage of. Afterward, the reviewer has a responsibility to give a recommendation and notify the editor if they found any proofs of fraud during the peer-review process.

Duties of Journal and Publisher

The journal and publisher should be committed, ensuring that any sources of funding have no influence on the editorial decision. They must construct a policy which accommodates the merits of the development of science and the protection of the intellectual rights of the author. The journal and editor should allow corrections, retractions, and revision from the author through a flexible mechanism after getting the endorsement of the editor.

 

Allegations of Misconduct

Plagiarism

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

  • Directly copying text from other sources without attribution
  • Copying ideas, images, or data from other sources without attribution
  • Reusing text from your own previous publications without attribution or agreement of the editor
  • Exception: Reusing text from the Methods section in the author’s previous publications, with attribution to the source, is acceptable.
  • Using an idea from another source with slightly modified language without attribution.

If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we may issue a correction or retract the paper as appropriate.

Data fabrication 

This concerns the making up of research findings.

  • Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript
  • Suspected fabricated data in a published manuscript

Data falsification 

Manipulating research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes manipulating images (e.g., micrographs, gels, radiological images), removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, changing, adding or omitting data points, etc.

Duplicate submissions

Duplicate submission is a situation whereby an author submits the same or similar manuscripts to two different journals at the same time, either within Academic Journals or any other publisher. This includes the submission of manuscripts derived from the same data in such a manner that there are no substantial differences in the manuscripts. Duplicate submission also includes the submission of the same/similar manuscript in different languages to different journals.

Authorship Issues

Clear policies (that allow for transparency around who contributed to the work and in what capacity) should be in place for requirements for authorship and contributorship, as well as processes for managing potential disputes.

Citation Manipulation

Citation Manipulation includes excessive citations in the submitted manuscript that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and have been included solely for the purpose of increasing citations to a given author’s work or to articles published in a particular journal. This leads to misrepresenting the importance of the specific work and journal in which it appears and is thus a form of scientific misconduct.

Suspected Manipulation of Peer Review/Bias of Peer Reviews

Komunikator selects the reviewers on any manuscript with due care so as to avoid any conflict of interest between the reviewers and the authors. Our policy is compliant with COPE Guidelines on peer review.

 

Plagiarism Issue

The manuscript submitted into Komunikator will be screened for plagiarism using Turnitin.  If an article is indicated as a plagiary, it will be rejected and will not be reviewed.   

Here are some of the actions passed by the Editorial board:

  1. A similarity index above 40%: in this case, the article is rejected due to poor paraphrasing or citation leading to an outright rejection – NO RESUBMISSION accepted.
  2. A similarity index within 10-40%: in this case, the publication is sent to the author for correction and improvement. There is a need for the author to provide a correct citation to similar places and proper paraphrasing for citations.
  3. A similarity index less than 10%: here, accepted or citation improvements might be needed – all outsourced texts must be given a proper citation.

In the second and third cases, there is a need for careful revision of the article from the author(s). The author(s) need to add citation and paraphrasing to outsourced texts. At the time of examining the submitted article, there should be a Turnitin report showing NO PLAGIARISM or plagiarism of less than 10%.

 

Reference Management

All the served data or quotes in the article taken from the other author articles should attach the reference sources. The references should use a reference application management such as Mendeley, End Note, or Zotero. The writing format that used in Jurnal Kajian Komunikasi follows the format applied by APA 6thEdition (American Psychological Association).

 

Journal Digital Archiving

This journal utilizes the Indonesia One Search (IOS) system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

Self Archiving

Komunikator supports self-archiving (Google Drive). Komunikator permits and encourages authors to make their research visible and accessible to their peers by uploading the final published version of their articles in personal or institutional repositories immediately after publication while providing bibliographic details that credit, if applicable, its publication in the journal.

Indexing

Komunikator's Abstracting/Indexing services store much essential information about the articles. Additionally, two of our journal’s Abstracting/Indexing services archive not only the metadata about the article, but the electronic versions of the articles, as well. Therefore, copies of the articles are available to the scientific community through their systems as an alternative to the journal's own.

All published articles are assigned to Digital Object Identifier (DOI) by CrossRef. Komunikator deposits publications in multiple digital archives worldwide to guarantee long-term digital preservation. All published articles are indexed in Google Scholar, GARUDA, and Directory Open-Access Journal (DOAJ). All articles are permanently archived and available in HTML and PDF formats. Komunikator makes article metadata available in compliance with Open Archives Initiative protocols, enabling automated 'harvesting' of our research articles for inclusion in other digital archives. We support non-exclusive digital archiving of research articles by as many international archives as possible, to ensure the security and permanent accessibility of that research.

 

Ethical Guidance

Ethical Oversight

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), ethical oversight should include but is not limited to, policies on consent to publication, publication on vulnerable populations, ethical conduct of research using animals, ethical conduct of research using human subjects, handling confidential data and ethical business/marketing practices. Komunikator is committed to considering appeals concerning our authors' non-observance of ethical principles.

Research Involving Human Subjects

When reporting studies that involve human participants, authors should include a statement that the studies have been approved by the appropriate institutional and/or national research ethics committee and have been performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/), revised in 2013, and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the 1975 Helsinki Declaration or comparable standards, the authors must explain the reasons for their approach and demonstrate that the independent ethics committee or institutional review board explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. At a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be stated in Section ‘Ethical Approval’ of the article.

An example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before participating in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."

Use of Animals in Research

The welfare of animals used for research must be respected. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals have been followed and that the studies have been approved by a research ethics committee at the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted (where such a committee exists).

Komunikator endorses the ARRIVE guidelines (https://arriveguidelines.org/arrive-guidelines) for reporting experiments using live animals. Authors and reviewers can use the ARRIVE guidelines as a checklist, which can be found at: https://arriveguidelines.org/resources/author-checklists.

Research Involving Cell Lines

Methods sections for submissions reporting on research with cell lines should state the origin of any cell lines. For established cell lines, the provenance should be stated, and references must also be given to either a published paper or a commercial source. If previously unpublished de novo cell lines were used, including those gifted from another laboratory, details of institutional review board or ethics committee approval must be given, and confirmation of written informed consent must be provided if the line is of human origin.

Example of an ethical statement: "The HCT116 cell line was obtained from XXX. The MLH1+ cell line was provided by XXX, Ltd. The DLD-1 cell line was obtained from Dr. XXX. The DR-GFP and SA-GFP reporter plasmids were obtained from Dr. XXX, and the Rad51K133A expression vector was obtained from Dr. XXX."

Research Involving Plants

Experimental research on plants (either cultivated or wild), including a collection of plant material, must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines. We recommend that authors comply with the CBD (https://www.cbd.int/convention/) and the  (https://cites.org/eng).

For each submitted manuscript supporting genetic information and origin must be provided. For research manuscripts involving rare and non-model plants (other than, e.g., Arabidopsis thaliana, Nicotiana benthamiana, Oriza sativa, or many other typical model plants), voucher specimens must be deposited in an accessible herbarium or museum. Vouchers may be requested for review by future investigators to verify the identity of the material used in the study (especially if taxonomic rearrangements occur in the future). They should include details of the populations sampled on the site of collection (GPS coordinates), date of collection, and document the part(s) used in the study where appropriate. For rare, threatened, or endangered species, this can be waived, but it is necessary for the author to describe this in the cover letter.

Example of an ethical statement: "Torenia fournieri plants were used in this study. White-flowered Crown White (CrW) and violet-flowered Crown Violet (CrV) cultivars selected from ‘Crown Mix’ (XXX Company, City, Country) were kindly provided by Dr. XXX (XXX Institute, City, Country)."

 

Advertising Policy

At present, we do not publish any advertisements in Komunikator.

 

Digital Marketing

Komunikator uses direct mail jurnal.komunikator@gmail.com for digital marketing.