AIC Policies and Document Register

📚 Fifteen documents, all published in full, all free to read. Nothing that governs how this journal treats your work or your data is kept behind a request. Jump to the register →

A journal asks authors to trust it with unpublished work, with personal data, and in the student section with information about children. That trust is only reasonable if the rules are written down, dated, versioned, and readable without asking anyone's permission. This page is the complete register of documents AIC operates under.

Every document carries an identifier, a version number, an adoption date and a scheduled review date. Superseded versions are retained and available on request from the editorial office. Nothing here is summarised or paraphrased for public consumption: the page you reach from this table is the operative document itself.

Documents in force

100%

Published in full

Behind a login

Jun 2026

First issue adopted

ID	Document	Version	Adopted	Next review
`AIC-DOC-01`	Editorial and Publishing Policies Publication ethics under the COPE Core Practices, authorship, plagiarism screening, corrections and retractions, complaints and appeals, competing interests, data and reproducibility, copyright and licensing, open access, archiving, ownership and funding.	1.0	2 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-02`	Peer Review Policy How manuscripts are assessed: double-blind review, reviewer selection and obligations, the decision categories, timelines, appeals, and what reviewers are and are not asked to do.	1.0	3 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-03`	Privacy Statement The plain-language account of what data the journal holds, why, who sees it, how long it is kept and what you can ask us to do with it. Written for a general reader; AIC-DOC-04 is the operational version.	1.0	5 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-04`	Data Protection and GDPR Policy The operational policy: controller and accountability, the Article 30 record of processing, lawful bases, data subject rights and the limits on erasure, children and Article 8, the retention schedule, processors, international transfers and SCCs, the breach procedure, automated decisions, cookies, security and DPIAs.	1.0	8 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-05`	Child Protection and Under-18 Safeguarding Policy The named adult requirement and how consent is verified, communication rules binding editors and reviewers, data minimisation for young people, what is published and the right to switch to initials at 18, obligations on volunteers, and how to raise a concern.	1.0	10 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-06`	Research Ethics and Human Participants Policy Ethical approval and what to do without a committee, informed consent, disclosure control in small populations, deployed systems, community and indigenous data under the CARE Principles, animal research, and the required ethics statement.	1.0	11 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-07`	AI and Research Integrity Policy AI cannot be an author; what authors may do with AI tools and must disclose; the data, model and evaluation reporting requirements for AI research; dual-use assessment; the hard limits on AI in editorial work; and why the journal does not act on AI detector scores.	1.0	12 June 2026	December 2026 interim, June 2027 full
`AIC-DOC-08`	Accessibility Statement Conformance with WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the measures in place, the gaps we know about, the feedback route and its response times, and the adjustments available during submission and review.	1.0	15 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-09`	Terms of Use and Contributor Account Terms Reading and reuse under CC BY 4.0, the contributor account terms and what each side agrees to, suspension and closure, submissions, conduct, crawling and text mining, disclaimers, and governing law.	1.0	16 June 2026, account terms 22 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-10`	Preprint Server Moderation Policy Scope and eligibility for the preprint server, the endorsement mechanism, the seven moderation criteria, the arXiv-style pre-submission checks, licensing options, versioning and withdrawal, and the relationship between a preprint and the journal.	1.0	17 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-11`	Section Head Terms of Reference Duties of a section head, the term of appointment and notice, editorial independence, competing interests and recusal, confidentiality including the prohibition on third-party AI systems, data protection undertakings, and the conduct standard.	1.0	19 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-12`	Student Researcher Section Policy Who may submit, the formats accepted, the safety and ethics rules, mentor countersignature, guardian consent for authors under 18, the AI use rules written for students, and the review process and feedback guarantee.	1.0	18 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-13`	Records Retention Schedule The defined retention clock for every category of record the journal holds, from the permanent scholarly record to the 90-day server logs, with the reason for each. Issued as part of AIC-DOC-04.	1.0	8 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-14`	Personal Data Breach Response Procedure The six-step procedure from report to learning, the 72-hour supervisory authority notification under Article 33, the threshold for notifying affected individuals under Article 34, and the breach log. Issued as part of AIC-DOC-04.	1.0	23 June 2026	June 2027
`AIC-DOC-15`	Cookie Statement The site sets no cookies of any kind, runs no analytics and loads no tracking scripts. This document records that position, names the two third-party origins in use, and commits to updating this page before any cookie is ever set.	1.0	9 June 2026	June 2027

"What happens to my data?"

Start with the privacy statement for the plain version, then the data protection and GDPR policy for the operational detail, including the retention schedule and your rights.

"My child wants to submit. Is this safe?"

Read the safeguarding policy in full. It is written for parents and teachers as much as for editors, and covers the named adult requirement, how we communicate, and what gets published.

"Can I use AI tools writing my paper?"

Yes, with disclosure. The table in section 2 of the AI policy lists what is permitted and what is not, line by line, and section 2's example statement shows what a real disclosure looks like.

"My research involves people. What do I need?"

The research ethics policy, and particularly disclosure control, which is the most common reason a sound manuscript is returned for revision at this journal.

"How is my manuscript judged?"

The peer review policy for the process, the editorial policies for the standards, and the moderation criteria if you are posting a preprint instead.

"I want to join the board."

The section head terms of reference set out what you would be agreeing to, and the application form is on the same page.

"Can I reuse something you published?"

Almost certainly yes. See reading and reuse, and check the licence on the individual preprint if that is what you are reusing, since four options are available there.

"Something on the site does not work for me."

The accessibility statement lists what we have built, the gaps we already know about, and a feedback route with response times we hold ourselves to.

Adoption

Documents are adopted by the editorial board. The founding set was adopted across June 2026, ahead of the inaugural edition, so that the rules were settled before the first manuscript arrived rather than written in response to it. A new document takes effect on its adoption date unless it says otherwise.

Review

Every document is reviewed at least annually. The AI and research integrity policy is reviewed every six months instead, because the technology and the practice around it move faster than an annual cycle can track. Any document is also reviewed immediately after an incident that tests it: a breach, a safeguarding report, or a complaint that the document failed to answer.

Change

Material changes are announced on the affected page and in this register at least 30 days before they take effect, and apply only to work submitted after the effective date. Where a change materially affects processing that rests on your consent, we ask again rather than assume. Minor corrections — a broken link, a typo, a clarified sentence that changes no obligation — are made without notice and raise the version's minor number.

Version history

Every superseded version is retained. Ask the editorial office for any prior version of any document and we will send it, with the date it was in force. We do not quietly rewrite a policy and leave the old text unfindable, because a policy that can be silently changed is not a commitment.

Conflicts between documents

Where two documents appear to conflict, the more specific governs: the safeguarding policy over the general data protection policy on under-18 matters, the research ethics policy over the general editorial policies on human participants. Where a conflict is genuine rather than apparent, tell us and we will fix the text, because a conflict is a drafting failure rather than a puzzle for the reader to solve.

Asking about a document

Questions about any document go to the editorial office at editor@caribbeanaijournal.org, data protection questions to dataprotection@caribbeanaijournal.org, and safeguarding concerns to safeguarding@caribbeanaijournal.org. A person answers, and "it is in the policy" is not an answer we consider acceptable on its own.

Policies and Document Register

Documents in Force

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