Mission, Scope & Publishing Model

Our Mission

The Artificial Intelligence in the Caribbean (AIC) is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to advancing research on artificial intelligence as it applies to the Caribbean region and analogous small state contexts around the world.

We publish applied and policy-relevant work that closes the gap between academic research and real implementation. The test we apply is whether a government, a development bank, a firm, a community organization or a regulator could act on the paper.

The journal is published and funded by the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association, and edited by Adrian Dunkley as founding Editor-in-Chief. That funding relationship is what makes the journal free at every point: free to submit, free to publish, free to read. The Association appoints no editors and reviews no manuscripts.

The Caribbean faces challenges and opportunities that are unique in scale, geography, and institutional structure. Existing AI research ecosystems are concentrated in large-economy contexts that often do not translate directly to small island states with limited data infrastructure, thin public sector capacity, and high exposure to external shocks. AIC exists to change that.

Title History

The journal published as the Journal of Caribbean Artificial Intelligence and Systems (JCAIS) from its founding until August 2026, when it took its present title. Nothing else changed: same editors, same scope, same standards, same domain, and the same inaugural edition closing 14 September 2026. Nothing had yet been published under the former title, so no citation needs correcting, and references to JCAIS should be read as references to this journal.

Scope and Coverage

Two conditions define the scope. Work must apply machine learning or artificial intelligence, and it must engage the Caribbean, its diaspora, or the small-state and Small Island Developing State conditions the region shares. Within those two conditions the journal is deliberately wide, covering fifteen subject areas and twelve method tags under the AIC subject classification:

• cai.CLM Climate, Weather and Disaster Risk
• cai.FIN Finance, Insurance and Risk
• cai.GOV Public Policy, Governance and Law
• cai.SME Small Business, Trade and Informal Economies
• cai.INF Infrastructure, Compute and Data Systems
• cai.MED Health, Medicine and Life Sciences
• cai.AGR Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Security
• cai.TUR Tourism, Mobility and the Blue Economy
• cai.CUL Language, Culture and Creative Industries
• cai.EDU Education, Skills and the Workforce
• cai.NRG Energy, Water and Utilities
• cai.SEC Safety, Security and Border Systems
• cai.MIG Migration, Diaspora and Demography
• cai.SOC Ethics, Society and Human Rights
• cai.MTH Methods, Benchmarks and Open Datasets

We welcome submissions from researchers and practitioners based in the Caribbean, from diaspora scholars, and from international researchers whose work directly addresses Caribbean and small-state conditions.

Three Publication Tracks

AIC publishes through three routes, each with its own review standard and none of them charging a fee.

• Peer-reviewed articles. Double-blind review by two or more subject experts, published in a numbered edition under CC BY 4.0. This is the main journal.
• AIC Preprints. A regional preprint server in the arXiv tradition. Submissions are screened for scope and scholarly form rather than peer reviewed, announced within two working days, versioned and permanently citable. Posting a preprint never disqualifies a manuscript from review here.
• The Student Researcher Section. A reviewed section for secondary school, sixth form and undergraduate authors aged 13 and over, working with a mentor who countersigns the submission. Every student submission receives written reviewer feedback, whatever the decision.

Publishing Model

AIC is fully open access. Everything published is freely available worldwide under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which allows reuse, adaptation and redistribution with attribution. Authors retain copyright in their own work.

There are no article processing charges, no submission fees and no reader charges, in any of the three tracks. The journal is funded by the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association and sustained by the voluntary work of the editorial board and reviewer community. Comparable student journals charge around forty-five US dollars to submit, which decides who gets published on the basis of who can pay.

Publication Frequency

AIC publishes three editions per volume year. The inaugural edition is general in scope, and the two that follow carry themes. Preprints appear continuously and are not tied to the edition schedule.

Indexing and Registration

AIC is in the process of establishing the following infrastructure to ensure discoverability and permanence of all published work:

• ISSN registration. Registration with the International ISSN Centre is under way. The ISSN will be published here and in the footer of every page once assigned.
• DOI assignment. The journal is registering a DOI prefix with Crossref. Every article and every announced preprint version will carry a persistent DOI.
• DOAJ. Application to the Directory of Open Access Journals is planned following ISSN confirmation.
• Google Scholar. Inclusion follows the publication of per-article landing pages carrying the required citation metadata.
• Preprint indexing. The preprint server will be registered with the relevant repository directories, and its records exposed for harvesting, once the first announcements are live.

Ethics and Integrity

AIC adheres to the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). We expect authors to confirm that submitted work is original, has not been published elsewhere, and does not contain fabricated data, plagiarism, or undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Peer review is double blind. Where the Editor-in-Chief is an author on a submission, the file is handled entirely by an independent section editor and he is excluded from it. Full details are on the peer review policy page.

Contact

For editorial enquiries, submission questions, or partnership discussions, contact the editorial team at editor@caribbeanaijournal.org.