Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Asian Association of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology (ICAAIP 2017)

We would like to present, with great pleasure, our publication of the proceeding the 8th International Conference of Asian Association of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology (ICAAICP). This proceeding is part of the 8th ICAAIP which was held in the City of Makassar, Indonesia. The conference successfully attracted scientists and practitioners from many areas such as Psychology, Business, Language and Cultural Studies, Social Sciences, Engineering, and Education. The conference was aimed to broaden our understanding in the role of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology as well as bringing potential interrelations between Cultural Psychology and other disciplines.

One of the best part of our successful conference, we also invited significant paper works from around the globe. Surprisingly, many scientists and practitioners were interested to present their works in the conference. This is being said that the unique contribution of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology takes place in many area of life. Three months prior to the conference, we received more than 150 titles and abstracts. During the event, 120 authors came to present their papers. We hosted very astonishing experts in the event and they were able to share ideas and their future research projects.

Based on the list of papers presented in the conference, we invited all presenters to submit their full papers. Again, here we received 110 submissions and proceeded the papers to our editors’ desk for initial review. After the first process, our editors announced that only 90 papers survived the initial review while other 20 papers were rejected for publication. Many of the rejected papers showed poor quality in writing (e.g., grammatical errors) and high similarity index (indication of plagiarism).

In the next step, we informed the authors of the accepted papers that their papers satisfied the standard of our publication in Atlantis Press. Then, we sent the papers to our reviewers where each paper was reviewed by two blind reviewers. We only employed reviewers who were experts in their fields and had experiences in scientific publications. Many reviewers completed their job in three to six weeks. Each reviewer, then, sent the manuscript to our editorial team and the editorial team reviewed reviewers’ corrections, comments and decisions before announcing their decisions to the authors.

We ensured that each paper went through a robust review system and only papers with proper quality would be published. Out of 90 papers, 40 of them returned to authors for minor revisions while the rest returned for major revisions. Unfortunately, given specific deadline and standard, only 65 manuscripts were resubmitted to our system. Many of the papers were finally rejected as they failed to respond to our reviewers’ comments and suggestions. The final set of our publication process only included 65 manuscripts, this was 40% of all titles received by the conference committees. In other words, around 60% papers failed in the submission and review processes.

These selected papers came from authors with various backgrounds, they committed to present only high standard manuscripts which later contribute to the significant development of the Indigenous and Cultural Psychology and other related fields. At the end, we hope this proceeding provides our readers with new insights which may promote new studies and practices.