Publication Ethics

Authorship

Every author must be a real person with an ORCID identifier verified at submission. Ghost authorship and gift authorship — listing people who did not contribute substantively, or omitting people who did — are not accepted. Authorship disputes that surface after acceptance are handled by the curator and appended to the curation record at the paper’s permanent URL.

Use of AI

AI as a tool

AI is a tool. We do not care whether you used it. Using AI to draft, edit, code, generate figures, run analyses, or check your math is unremarkable. ICSAC’s own curation system runs on AI; we are not in a position to lecture authors about it.

AI is not a substitute for thinking

AI is not a substitute for your reasoning. Submissions where the underlying analysis, argument, or interpretation appears to have been generated rather than authored — where there is no evidence of original thought, judgment, or domain reasoning — will not be accepted. Replacing thinking with generation is dangerous and is treated as such.

Clean submissions

Submissions made using AI assistance must be clean. Residual prompt text, AI scratch notes, “as an AI language model” disclaimers, citation placeholders that were never resolved, hallucinated references, and similar artifacts disqualify the submission. The author is responsible for the final manuscript regardless of which tools produced any part of it.

Disclosure

AI-use disclosure is encouraged but not required. A short note in the methods or acknowledgments section is appreciated for the public record. Disclosure does not weight the decision — we evaluate the work.

Citation Integrity

Every citation is independently resolved against scholarly databases before the panel evaluates the manuscript. References that cannot be located are flagged. References that resolve are checked against the claim they are attached to. Fabricated, hallucinated, or substantively misattributed citations are grounds for decline regardless of other merits, and grounds for retraction if discovered post-publication.

Original Work and Prior Deposit

Submissions must not be under active review at another journal. Prior deposit on a preprint server (Zenodo, arXiv, OSF, SSRN, etc.) does not disqualify a submission — the DOI route is built around exactly that workflow. Republication of substantively identical work already published in a peer-reviewed venue is not in scope.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors disclose financial, institutional, and personal conflicts at submission. Undisclosed conflicts discovered later are added to the curation record. The curator recuses from any submission where they have a substantive prior relationship with the author or a financial interest in the outcome. Documented recusals are part of the curation record. The AI panel does not carry conflicts in the traditional sense; the curator’s role is the human check on every case.

Corrections, Updates, and Retractions

Published papers receive permanent URLs. If an error is identified post-publication, the curation record is updated in place — the original record is preserved with a dated correction or retraction notice appended. We do not delete published material; we annotate it. Retractions explain the cause: authorial error, methodological flaw, or misconduct. The original record remains visible.

Reporting Concerns

Allegations of misconduct — fabrication, plagiarism, undisclosed conflicts, authorship disputes — go to [email protected] with the submission ID and a short description. The curator investigates. Outcomes are appended to the curation record at the paper’s permanent URL.

Curation Advisors

See Curate for current Curation Advisor recruitment, eligibility, and how to apply.