Academic communication governance and authorship regulation: A critical policy and discourse analysis of the 'non-single author' requirement in Indonesian academic promotion policy - a mixed-methods study

Background: Authorship structures allocate intellectual credit and responsibil-ity in scholarly communication. Indonesian policy requires works used for special academic-promotion requirements to be non-single-authored, making authorship structure an eligibility criterion. Objectives: To analyse the communicative and epistemic implications of this condi-tion through an academic communication governance framework. Methods: The authors combined critical policy and discourse analysis of the minis-terial regulation with content analysis of 164 public Threads posts from January to March 2026 and descriptive comparison of selected international research-assess-ment frameworks. Posts were thematically coded and analysed using descriptive sta-tistics and a chi-square test; intercoder reliability was assessed with Cohen’s kappa. Results: Policy analysis showed non-single authorship operating as an eligibility condition within special promotion requirements. Social media analysis identified 5 themes: academic freedom, structural inequality, policy legitimacy, publication eth-ics, and disciplinary difference. Critical posts constituted 87.2% of the corpus; aca-demic freedom and structural inequality were most frequent, each at 22.0%. Theme and stance were strongly associated (χ2 = 95.61, df = 8, P < .001; Cramer’s V = 0.540). No equivalent minimum-author requirement was identified in the 8 selected compara-tive contexts. Conclusions: The condition separates authorship structure from assessment of actual contribution. Contribution-based evaluation using transparent authorship disclo-sure, including CRediT, offers a more contribution-sensitive and ethically defensible alternative.