Ethical Oversight Policy

Multidisciplinary Journals (MJ)  |  e-ISSN 3047-8499

1. Purpose, Scope, and Policy Boundary

This policy applies to all submissions and research activities within the multidisciplinary scope of MJ, including humanities, social sciences, management, engineering, health sciences, biology, and physical education. It governs ethical review, participant protection, informed consent, consent for publication, research involving vulnerable persons or communities, human biological materials, clinical trials, animal welfare, field and internet research, community and culturally governed knowledge, biosafety, environmental permissions, and dual-use concerns.

This page does not redefine general publication misconduct, plagiarism, data fabrication, authorship, competing interests, data availability, privacy administration, peer-review procedure, artificial-intelligence use, or corrective notices. Those matters remain governed by the separate policies identified in Section 16. When several policies apply, this policy determines the ethical acceptability and oversight of the research activity; the other policy governs its own specific subject.

2. Governing Ethical Principles

• Respect for persons and communities: recognise autonomy, dignity, culture, legitimate community authority, and the right to make an informed and voluntary decision.
• Beneficence and non-maleficence: maximise reasonable benefits, minimise foreseeable harm, and maintain proportionate safeguards throughout the research.
• Justice and inclusion: select participants fairly, distribute burdens and benefits equitably, and avoid exploitation or unjustified exclusion.
• Scientific and social value: expose no person, animal, community, or environment to burdens that are not justified by a sound question and appropriate method.
• Independent review: use a competent and sufficiently independent body whenever formal review is required.
• Privacy and confidentiality: collect only necessary information and protect identities, communications, records, locations, and sensitive materials.
• Transparency and accountability: report approval, consent, registration, deviations, adverse events, limitations, funding, and ethically relevant changes accurately.
• Animal welfare and environmental responsibility: avoid unnecessary use or harm, apply appropriate alternatives and safeguards, and comply with permits and welfare standards.

3. When Review, Approval, Registration, or Permission Is Required

Authors are responsible for identifying all approvals and permissions required in the country and institution where the research was designed, conducted, analysed, or reported. The following table states MJ's minimum editorial expectations; stricter legal, institutional, funder, professional, or local requirements continue to apply.

4. Mandatory Ethics Statement in the Manuscript

Every submission involving an ethically relevant activity must contain a clearly labelled Ethics Approval and Consent to Participate statement. It should normally appear in the Methods section and in the journal's declarations section. The statement must correspond to the study described and include, as applicable:

• the full name and institution of the approving or exempting committee;
• approval, exemption, permit, or protocol number and approval date;
• the ethical standards, national requirements, or institutional rules followed;
• how informed consent, assent, guardian permission, waiver, or alternative authorization was obtained;
• whether consent for publication was separately obtained when identifiable content is reported;
• clinical-trial registry name, registration number, and registration date;
• relevant animal, biosafety, fieldwork, collection, access, or community permissions; and
• material deviations from the approved protocol and how they were reviewed or managed.

For double-blind review, identifying details may be replaced temporarily with a neutral placeholder in the blinded manuscript, but complete information and supporting documents must be supplied confidentially to the editorial office at submission. The full statement must appear in the accepted version.

5. Human Participants and Informed Consent

• Consent information must be understandable, culturally and linguistically appropriate, and provided before participation unless a competent ethics body has authorised another approach.
• Participants should be informed of the study purpose, procedures, foreseeable risks and benefits, confidentiality limits, data use and sharing, compensation or costs, voluntary nature, right to decline or withdraw, and relevant contacts.
• Recruitment, incentives, authority relationships, grades, employment, clinical care, institutional dependence, or economic vulnerability must not create coercion or undue influence.
• When a person cannot provide full legal consent, researchers must obtain authorised permission and the person's assent where appropriate, while respecting dissent and evolving capacity.
• Children, students, patients, employees, persons with impaired decision-making capacity, economically or socially marginalised groups, displaced persons, prisoners, and others in dependent or high-risk circumstances require safeguards proportionate to their situation.
• A waiver or alteration of consent must be authorised where required and justified by minimal risk, impracticability, protection of rights and welfare, and any required debriefing or additional information.

6. Consent for Publication, Anonymity, and Confidentiality

Consent to participate is not automatically consent to publish identifiable information. Authors must obtain explicit consent for publication when a person may reasonably be identified from names, images, audio, video, facial features, detailed quotations, case histories, pedigrees, locations, rare characteristics, or combinations of information. Consent should cover the intended publication format and open online availability.

• Remove unnecessary identifiers and use pseudonyms, aggregation, masking, or other safeguards without distorting the scholarly record.
• Do not assume that removing names prevents identification, particularly in small communities, workplaces, schools, clinical cases, online groups, photographs, or qualitative research.
• The journal may request evidence that consent for publication was obtained. Consent forms or private correspondence must be transmitted securely and are not published unless the participant expressly authorised publication.
• If an identifiable person has died or cannot be contacted, publication requires a defensible legal and ethical basis, proportionate privacy protection, and editorial assessment; public interest alone does not automatically override confidentiality.

The handling of account data and personal information collected by the journal itself is governed by the Privacy Statement. Availability and controlled sharing of research datasets are governed by the Research Data Policy.

7. Social Sciences, Humanities, Internet, and Community Research

MJ recognises that ethical oversight extends beyond biomedical experiments. Interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, archival work, classroom research, social-media research, platform data, recorded performance, oral history, and community-based research may create privacy, power, cultural, safety, reputational, or group-level risks even when physical risk is low.

• Publicly accessible does not always mean ethically unrestricted: authors should consider users' reasonable expectations, platform terms, contextual privacy, searchability, quotation traceability, and the vulnerability of individuals or groups.
• Deception or incomplete disclosure: use only when methodologically necessary, proportionate, independently authorised where required, and followed by appropriate debriefing unless debriefing would cause greater harm.
• Classroom or workplace research: separate educational, supervisory, employment, or service authority from voluntary research participation and provide a safe route to decline.
• Community and culturally governed knowledge: respect legitimate community consultation, consent, attribution, cultural protocols, restrictions, benefit-sharing, and governance. Individual consent may not be sufficient when publication could cause collective harm.
• Oral history, archives, and creative works: distinguish legal access from ethical permission, respect donor or archive conditions, and assess identification, copyright, cultural sensitivity, and consequences of digital republication.

8. Health Research and Clinical Trials

Research involving human health, identifiable human biological materials, health records, clinical procedures, behavioural health interventions, or prospective assignment to health-related interventions must comply with applicable national requirements, the responsible health-research ethics committee, and internationally recognised principles appropriate to the study. In Indonesia, authors should follow applicable requirements and guidance issued through the competent health-research ethics system, including the National Health Research Ethics Committee framework where relevant.

• Clinical trials must be registered prospectively, before recruitment of the first participant, in a registry recognised by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform or accepted by ICMJE.
• The manuscript must report the registry, registration number, date, ethics approval, protocol deviations, funding, intervention, harms, and results consistently with the registered record.
• Late registration must be disclosed and justified. It does not automatically cure the absence of prospective registration, and the editor may decline the manuscript.
• Case reports and clinical images require appropriate publication consent whenever identification is reasonably possible, even if identifying details have been removed.
• Ethics approval, trial registration, or regulatory permission does not guarantee publication; scientific validity and compliance with all journal policies remain necessary.

9. Research Involving Animals

Animal research must be scientifically justified, approved before it begins, conducted by appropriately trained persons, and compliant with applicable animal welfare law, institutional standards, permits, and accepted disciplinary guidance.

• Replacement: use non-animal alternatives whenever they can answer the research question adequately.
• Reduction: use no more animals than scientifically necessary while preserving valid design and analysis.
• Refinement: minimise pain, distress, lasting harm, and avoidable environmental impact through appropriate housing, handling, anaesthesia, analgesia, monitoring, humane endpoints, and euthanasia methods.
• Authors must report species, strain or source, sex where relevant, sample size rationale, allocation, blinding, exclusions, adverse events, welfare monitoring, and approval details sufficiently for ethical and scientific evaluation.
• Manuscripts describing in vivo experiments should comply with the ARRIVE 2.0 Essential 10 at minimum; full ARRIVE reporting is encouraged.

10. Biological Materials, Biosafety, Environment, and Cultural Resources

Research involving human or non-human biological materials, pathogens, genetically modified organisms, hazardous chemicals, protected species, biodiversity, archaeological or cultural materials, traditional knowledge, or environmentally sensitive sites must comply with all relevant access, collection, transport, export, import, biosafety, biosecurity, environmental, cultural-heritage, material-transfer, and benefit-sharing requirements.

• The manuscript must identify relevant permits, approving authorities, material sources, accession or voucher information, and responsible repositories where appropriate.
• Authors must demonstrate lawful provenance and must not publish or transfer materials obtained through illegal, exploitative, destructive, or unauthorised activity.
• Methods should minimise ecological damage, waste, contamination, hazards to researchers and communities, and unnecessary depletion of scarce or protected resources.
• When full technical disclosure would create a serious, credible misuse or security risk, authors must alert the editor confidentially. Any limitation on disclosure must be narrowly tailored and must not be used to conceal weak methods, unsupported claims, or misconduct.

11. Protocol Changes, Adverse Events, and Continuing Oversight

Ethical responsibility continues after initial approval. Authors must obtain additional review when required for material protocol amendments, new sites, changed populations, new data uses, altered consent, extended recruitment, increased risk, or other activities outside the approved scope. Serious or unexpected adverse events, unanticipated risks, protocol violations, complaints, or suspension by an oversight body must be reported to the responsible body and disclosed to the journal when relevant to the submission or published record.

A manuscript must not describe procedures as approved when the approval did not cover them. Where a deviation was necessary to protect safety, the authors must explain the circumstances, immediate action, subsequent reporting, and determination of the responsible body.

12. Documents the Journal May Request

During screening, peer review, revision, or post-publication assessment, MJ may request confidential evidence reasonably necessary to verify ethical compliance, including:

Documents should be authentic, legible, and sufficiently translated for editorial assessment when not in Indonesian or English. Authors should redact unnecessary personal information before secure transmission. The journal will not normally publish approval letters, consent forms, participant identities, or confidential permits.

13. Responsibilities

14. Suspected Non-Compliance

Concerns may arise from missing or inconsistent approval details, implausible consent, research outside the approved scope, retrospective approval, unregistered clinical trials, participant complaints, harmful identification, animal welfare concerns, unlawful materials, falsified documents, or information supplied by an institution, regulator, reader, reviewer, or whistleblower.

The journal may contact an institution or competent authority when necessary to protect participants, animals, communities, the public, or the scholarly record. Authors will normally be given an opportunity to respond unless immediate action is required for safety, law, privacy, or evidence preservation.

15. Appeals and Good-Faith Reporting

An author may appeal an ethical-oversight decision by identifying a material factual error, procedural irregularity, unmanaged conflict of interest, or relevant evidence that was overlooked. Disagreement with a requirement or editorial risk assessment, without supporting evidence, is not by itself sufficient.

Participants, researchers, reviewers, readers, institutions, and other stakeholders may report concerns in good faith through the journal's official contact channel. Matters are handled confidentially and without retaliation to the extent possible. Appeals and complaints follow the Appeals and Complaints Policy.

16. Relationship with Other MJ Policies

17. Reference Frameworks

This policy is informed by recognised ethical frameworks while remaining subject to applicable Indonesian law, institutional requirements, and discipline-specific standards:

• COPE Core Practice: Ethical Oversight.
• NESH Guidelines for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
• World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.
• Indonesia's National Health Research Ethics Committee framework (KEPKN).
• WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.
• ARRIVE Guidelines 2.0 for animal research reporting.

18. Contact

Questions about the applicability of this policy should be submitted before manuscript submission whenever possible. Authors should describe the study type, participants or materials, country and institution, oversight already obtained, and the specific issue requiring clarification. General editorial guidance does not replace formal advice or approval from a competent ethics body.