Editorial and Publishing Policies

This page sets out the editorial and publishing policies of the Journal of Caribbean Artificial Intelligence and Systems (JCAIS). Together with our Peer Review Policy and Privacy and Data Protection Statement, it constitutes the journal’s public statement of editorial standards. These policies apply to every manuscript submitted to, and every article published by, the journal.

Publication Ethics

JCAIS follows the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Editors, reviewers, and authors are each bound by defined obligations:

• Editors make decisions on the scholarly merit of a manuscript alone, without regard to the author’s nationality, institution, seniority, gender, or personal relationship with the editorial team. Editors recuse themselves from any manuscript in which they have a competing interest, and handling is transferred to another editor.
• Reviewers must declare competing interests before accepting an assignment, treat manuscripts as confidential documents, and decline assignments they are not qualified to assess. Reviewers may not use unpublished material from a manuscript in their own work.
• Authors must ensure the work is original, accurately reported, free of fabricated or manipulated data, and not under consideration elsewhere.

Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship is limited to those who have made a substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work; the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the drafting and critical revision of the manuscript — and who approve the final version and accept accountability for it. This follows the authorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), adapted for AI and social science research.

Contributors who do not meet these criteria — including funders, data providers, and technical support staff — should be named in the acknowledgements with their permission.

Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must be made in writing by the corresponding author, with the written agreement of every author, including any being removed. Authorship changes after acceptance are granted only in exceptional circumstances.

Use of Generative AI in Submitted Work

JCAIS publishes AI research and takes a practical, disclosure-based position on the use of AI tools in manuscript preparation:

• AI systems cannot be listed as authors. Authorship requires accountability, which an AI system cannot hold.
• Disclosure is mandatory. Any substantive use of generative AI — drafting, summarising, translating, code generation, data synthesis, literature search — must be disclosed in the methods section or the acknowledgements, naming the tool, version, and how it was used.
• Routine assistance need not be disclosed. Spelling and grammar checking, reference formatting, and similar mechanical assistance do not require disclosure.
• Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of the entire manuscript, including any AI-assisted content. Fabricated references or unverifiable citations are treated as research misconduct regardless of how they were produced.
• Reviewers may not upload manuscripts to AI systems that retain or train on submitted content. Manuscripts under review are confidential.

Plagiarism and Originality Screening

All manuscripts passing the initial editorial screen are checked for textual overlap with published literature. Substantial unattributed overlap results in rejection. Where overlap is detected in an already-published article, JCAIS follows the relevant COPE flowchart and may issue a correction or retraction and notify the authors’ institutions.

Redundant publication: manuscripts that substantially duplicate work already published by the same authors will be rejected. Prior posting of a preprint is permitted and is not treated as prior publication, but must be disclosed at submission with the preprint DOI or URL.

Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern

The published version of record is permanent. Where an error is identified after publication, JCAIS issues one of the following, each linked bidirectionally to the original article:

Articles are never silently altered or removed. To raise a concern about a published article, contact editor@caribbeanaijournal.org.

Complaints and Appeals

Complaints about editorial decisions, process, or conduct should be sent to editor@caribbeanaijournal.org and are acknowledged within five business days. Complaints are handled by an editor who was not involved in the original decision. Where a complaint concerns the Editor-in-Chief, it is referred to the International Advisory Board.

Appeals against rejection are governed by the Peer Review Policy and must be lodged within 30 days of the decision.

Competing Interests

All authors must declare financial and non-financial competing interests at submission, including employment, consultancies, grants, patents, honoraria, paid expert testimony, board memberships, and personal relationships that a reasonable reader might consider relevant. Declarations are published with the article. A declaration of “none” is published where no competing interests exist.

Editors and reviewers are subject to the same standard. Manuscripts authored by an editor are handled entirely by a different editor, and the editor-author is excluded from the decision record.

Data, Code, and Reproducibility

JCAIS strongly encourages deposit of data, code, and analysis scripts in a public repository (for example Zenodo, OSF, Dataverse, or GitHub with an archived release) and citation of that deposit in the article. Every article must carry a data availability statement.

Where data cannot be shared — because it is commercially sensitive, personally identifying, or held under a government agreement — the statement must say so explicitly and describe the conditions under which access could be granted. Undisclosed unavailability of data underpinning published claims is treated as a breach of this policy.

Copyright, Licensing, and Author Rights

• Authors retain copyright in their work. JCAIS does not require a transfer of copyright.
• All articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, permitting reuse, adaptation, and redistribution for any purpose with attribution.
• Authors grant JCAIS a non-exclusive right of first publication.
• Authors may deposit the submitted, accepted, and published versions in any repository or personal site at any time, with no embargo.
• Third-party material reproduced in an article remains under its own licence; authors are responsible for securing permission and citing the source.

Open Access and Charges

JCAIS is a fully open-access journal. All content is free to read, download, and reuse from the moment of publication, with no subscription, registration, or paywall of any kind.

There are no article processing charges (APCs), submission fees, page charges, or colour charges. No fee of any kind is payable by authors or readers. This policy will be reviewed as the journal scales, and any change will be announced in advance and will not apply retrospectively to manuscripts already under review.

Digital Archiving and Preservation

Permanence of the scholarly record is a condition of credible publishing. JCAIS commits to the following:

• Every published article is issued as an archival PDF alongside its web version.
• The journal is working towards enrolment in a recognised dark archive for open-access journals, such as CLOCKSS or the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN), once the ISSN is assigned.
• Authors are encouraged to deposit the published version in an institutional repository; no embargo applies.
• Should the journal cease publication, the full archive will be transferred to a recognised preservation service and remain openly accessible.

Ownership, Funding, and Advertising

JCAIS is published by the Caribbean AI Journal Initiative. The journal is sustained by institutional support and the voluntary contributions of its editorial board and reviewer community. It receives no revenue from authors or readers.

The journal carries no advertising and accepts no sponsored, promotional, or paid editorial content. Where a research programme is funded by an external body, that funding is disclosed in the article. No funder, sponsor, or institution has any role in editorial decision-making, which rests solely with the editors.

Indexing and Registration

The journal is establishing the infrastructure required for discoverability and permanence. Current status is maintained on the About page and updated as each registration is confirmed.

Policy Review

These policies are reviewed annually by the editorial board and revised as the journal develops. Material changes are announced on this page and take effect only for manuscripts submitted after the date of change.