Al-Qalam is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Balai Penelitian dan Pengembangan Agama Makassar, formerly known as Balai Penelitian Lektur Keagamaan Ujung Pandang. The journal has been published continuously since 1990 and is published twice a year, in June and November.

Al-Qalam publishes original research articles in the fields of religious and socio-cultural studies. Its scope includes religious community guidance and services; religious education and religious affairs; contemporary religious literature and texts; socio-religious history; religious archaeology; and the religious arts and cultures of the Indonesian archipelago.

The journal primarily serves researchers, lecturers, students, policymakers, religious practitioners, and professionals interested in religious and socio-cultural studies.

Al-Qalam is a fully open access journal. All scholarly articles are made freely and immediately available upon publication, without subscription fees, access charges, registration requirements, or embargo periods.

Readers may access, read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, share, and reuse published articles in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Copyright in articles published by Al-Qalam remains with the author(s). By publishing in Al-Qalam, the author(s) grant the journal the non-exclusive right of first publication and agree that the article will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Unless otherwise indicated, articles published by Al-Qalam are licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This license permits users to copy, distribute, share, and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the author(s) and Al-Qalam as the place of first publication, a link to the license is provided, any changes are indicated, and adaptations are distributed under the same license.

Any third-party material not covered by the article’s Creative Commons license must be clearly identified in the relevant article.

Authors may enter into separate contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the published version of their articles, such as depositing an article in an institutional repository or including it in a book, provided that its initial publication in Al-Qalam is properly acknowledged.

Al-Qalam does not charge authors any submission fees, editorial processing charges, article processing charges, or publication fees.

Prospective authors must carefully read and comply with the journal’s Author Guidelines and manuscript template before submitting a manuscript.

Manuscripts that do not conform to the journal’s aims and scope, required structure, formatting requirements, citation style, or technical guidelines may be returned to the authors for correction or rejected during the initial editorial screening before peer review.

All submitted manuscripts are screened using Turnitin.

A similarity score exceeding 20% will trigger further editorial assessment and may result in the manuscript being returned for revision or rejected. The similarity score is not automatically treated as evidence of plagiarism. Editors evaluate each similarity report by considering the matched sources, context, quotation practices, attribution, and the nature of the matched material.

Manuscripts that pass the initial editorial screening undergo a double-anonymous peer-review process, also known as double-blind peer review. In this process, the identities of the authors and reviewers are concealed from each other.

Each manuscript is evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with relevant subject expertise and no conflicts of interest concerning the manuscript. Reviewers provide scholarly assessments and recommendations to support the editorial decision-making process.

The final decision to accept a manuscript, request revisions, or reject a manuscript is made by the Editor-in-Chief after considering the reviewers’ recommendations, the authors’ responses to the reviews, and the journal’s editorial assessment.

Al-Qalam is accredited as a SINTA 2 journal under Decree Number 177/E/KPT/2024, issued on 15 October 2024.