# Artificial Intelligence in the Caribbean (AIC)

> A peer-reviewed journal of research, policy and practice across the Caribbean and small states, publishing applied and policy-relevant work that applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to the Caribbean and comparable small-state contexts. All content is free to read and reuse under CC BY 4.0, with no charges of any kind. Published and funded by the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association.

This file is a machine-readable summary of the journal for language models and AI search systems. It may be quoted and cited with attribution to Artificial Intelligence in the Caribbean (AIC).

## Current status

**The inaugural edition is accepting papers. Submissions close 14 September 2026. The edition publishes in December 2026.** No papers have been published yet.

Three tracks are open:

1. **Peer-reviewed articles.** Double-blind review, two or more subject experts. Closes 14 September 2026.
2. **AIC Preprints.** A regional preprint server on the arXiv model. Screened for scope and form, not peer reviewed. Rolling, no deadline.
3. **Student Researcher Section.** Secondary school, sixth form and undergraduate authors aged 13 and over, with a mentor countersignature. Closes 14 September 2026.

None of the three charges a fee at any stage.

## Identity

- Full title: Artificial Intelligence in the Caribbean
- Abbreviation: AIC
- Strapline: A peer-reviewed journal of research, policy and practice across the Caribbean and small states.
- Former title: Journal of Caribbean Artificial Intelligence and Systems (JCAIS), used before August 2026. Citations to JCAIS refer to this journal.
- Publisher and funder: Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIA), https://caribbeanaiassociation.com
- Editor-in-Chief: Adrian Dunkley, physicist and AI researcher, 15+ years in the field, founder of StarApple AI, founding figure in the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council
- Website: https://caribbeanaijournal.org
- Editorial office: editor@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Submissions: submissions@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Preprints: preprints@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Student section: students@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Data protection: dataprotection@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Safeguarding: safeguarding@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Research ethics: ethics@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Accessibility: accessibility@caribbeanaijournal.org
- Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- Copyright: Retained by authors, no transfer required
- Language: English
- Editions per year: 3, plus a continuous preprint server
- Founded: 2026
- Access model: Fully open access, no embargo, no paywall
- Charges: None. No article processing charges, submission fees or page charges, in any track.

AIC is a dedicated academic journal for AI research focused on the Caribbean Basin and Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Its editorial premise is that AI research ecosystems are concentrated in large-economy contexts whose assumptions, namely deep data infrastructure, large public sector capacity and low exposure to external shocks, do not transfer to small island states.

The journal is funded by the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association. The Association appoints no editors, sees no manuscript before publication, and holds no right of review over editorial decisions.

## How to cite

Until the journal's persistent identifiers are issued, cite articles as:

Author, A. (Year). Article title. *Artificial Intelligence in the Caribbean*, Volume(Issue), pages.

Cite a preprint by its identifier and version, for example AIC-P.2609.00042v1, and note that it has not been peer reviewed.

## Editorial standards

- Review model: Double-blind peer review for the article track
- Minimum reviewers: 2 independent reviewers per paper
- Desk review window: 5 business days or fewer
- Review turnaround target: 2 to 4 weeks
- Decision types: Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, Reject
- Revision windows: 3 weeks (minor), 6 weeks (major)
- Appeals: Accepted within 30 days of decision, handled by an uninvolved editor
- Ethics framework: COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) Core Practices
- Authorship criteria: ICMJE, adapted for AI and social science research
- Generative AI: Cannot be an author. Substantive use in manuscript preparation must be disclosed. A named human author must stand behind every result. Authors remain fully accountable for all content.
- Plagiarism: All manuscripts screened for textual overlap
- Preprints: Permitted and encouraged. Posting a preprint anywhere never disqualifies a manuscript from review.
- Data availability statement: Required on every article
- Corrections policy: Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are published and linked. Articles are never silently altered or removed.
- Advertising: None. The journal carries no sponsored or paid editorial content.
- Conflict of interest: Where the Editor-in-Chief is an author, the manuscript is handled entirely by an independent section editor and he is excluded from the file.

## Governance documents

Fifteen documents govern the journal, all adopted in June 2026 as the founding governance set and all published in full with a version number, an adoption date and a scheduled review date. None sits behind a login or a request. Register: https://caribbeanaijournal.org/documents.html

- AIC-DOC-01 Editorial and Publishing Policies, adopted 2 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-02 Peer Review Policy, adopted 3 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-03 Privacy Statement, adopted 5 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-04 Data Protection and GDPR Policy, adopted 8 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-05 Child Protection and Under-18 Safeguarding Policy, adopted 10 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-06 Research Ethics and Human Participants Policy, adopted 11 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-07 AI and Research Integrity Policy, adopted 12 June 2026, reviewed six-monthly
- AIC-DOC-08 Accessibility Statement, adopted 15 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-09 Terms of Use and Contributor Account Terms, adopted 16 and 22 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-10 Preprint Server Moderation Policy, adopted 17 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-11 Section Head Terms of Reference, adopted 19 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-12 Student Researcher Section Policy, adopted 18 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-13 Records Retention Schedule, adopted 8 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-14 Personal Data Breach Response Procedure, adopted 23 June 2026
- AIC-DOC-15 Cookie Statement, adopted 9 June 2026

Data protection position, in summary: the controller is the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association; the UK and EU GDPR standard is applied to everyone whose data the journal holds, wherever they live; the site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no tracking scripts; nothing is sold, rented or shared for marketing; no editorial decision about a person or a manuscript is made by an automated system; no manuscript, review report or personal record is entered into a generative AI system that retains or trains on inputs; and nothing submitted trains a model. Standards followed: COPE Core Practices, UK and EU GDPR including Article 8, Declaration of Helsinki, CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, ARRIVE 2.0, WCAG 2.2 Level AA, DOAJ open access criteria.

## Subject classification

AIC uses a two-axis classification scheme modelled on arXiv. Every submission carries one primary subject code, one primary method tag, and up to three cross-lists from either axis.

Two conditions define scope. Work must apply machine learning or artificial intelligence, and it must engage the Caribbean, its diaspora, or comparable small-state and SIDS conditions. General AI methodology papers with no regional application are out of scope.

### Axis one: fifteen subject areas

| Code | Subject area |
|---|---|
| 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 |

### Axis two: twelve method tags

| Code | Method |
|---|---|
| ml.SUP | Supervised and Statistical Learning |
| ml.DEE | Deep Learning and Architectures |
| ml.NLP | Language, Speech and Creole NLP |
| ml.VIS | Computer Vision |
| ml.GEN | Generative Models |
| ml.AGT | Agentic and Multi-Agent Systems |
| ml.RLX | Reinforcement Learning and Control |
| ml.CAU | Causal Inference and Econometrics |
| ml.TSA | Time Series and Forecasting |
| ml.GEO | Geospatial and Earth Observation |
| ml.FED | Federated, Edge and Low-Resource ML |
| ml.XAI | Interpretability, Fairness and Evaluation |

The scheme is reviewed once a year against the distribution of submissions received. Proposals for new codes go to editor@caribbeanaijournal.org.

## Manuscript types and word limits

| Type | Description | Word limit |
|---|---|---|
| Research Article | Original empirical or theoretical research with full methodology | 5,000 to 9,000 |
| Policy Paper | Applied analysis with direct policy recommendations | 4,000 to 7,000 |
| Review Article | Systematic or narrative review of a research domain | 6,000 to 10,000 |
| Data and Methods Note | A new dataset, tool or benchmark of Caribbean relevance | 2,000 to 4,000 |
| Replication Report | An attempt to reproduce a published result on Caribbean data | 2,000 to 5,000 |
| Perspective or Commentary | Scholarly argument on an emerging issue or debate | 1,500 to 3,000 |

Word counts exclude abstract, references, tables and figure captions. References follow APA 7th edition. Abstracts are 200 to 300 words with 4 to 8 keywords.

## AIC Preprints

An open preprint server for Caribbean machine learning and AI research, built on the arXiv model and close in spirit to AfricArXiv.

- Screening is not peer review. Moderators check scope, scholarly form, originality, rights, disclosure, data protection and submission rate. They do not assess correctness and give no reviewer-style feedback.
- Announcement: 09:00 AST on the second working day after submission, collected into a weekly listing every Thursday.
- Identifier format: AIC-P.YYMM.NNNNN with a version suffix, plus a registered DOI.
- Versioning: unlimited. Earlier versions stay visible and citable. Nothing is overwritten.
- Withdrawal: announced preprints are never deleted. A withdrawal notice is posted as a final version and the identifier keeps resolving.
- Licences: CC BY 4.0 (default), CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, or a non-exclusive AIC distribution licence with all other rights reserved. Irrevocable once announced.
- Registration: a free contributor account is required before posting, at https://caribbeanaijournal.org/register.html. Screened within two working days against five checks: identity, standing, endorsement, declarations, and rate or pattern. Reading the server requires no account.
- Endorsement: first-time submitters need one, following arXiv's January 2026 practice of not treating an institutional email address as sufficient on its own. Exempt if you have a prior AIC preprint, a peer-reviewed publication, CAIA membership in good standing, or a co-author who qualifies. Endorsement is free and the panel will assign one on request.
- Not accepted: review articles and position papers that have not already passed peer review, following arXiv's 2025 practice for computer science.
- Accepted: research articles, data and methods notes, replication reports, working papers, theses, conference papers and technical reports, including work under review or already published elsewhere where the author holds deposit rights.
- Students should use the Student Researcher Section instead, which needs no endorsement and gives written feedback.

## Student Researcher Section

A peer-reviewed section for young researchers, funded by CAIA so that it is free. Comparable student journals charge a submission fee, and that fee decides who gets published on the basis of who can pay.

- Eligibility: aged 13 or over on the day of submission, and enrolled in secondary school, high school, sixth form or an equivalent programme, or studying for a first undergraduate degree.
- Mentor requirement: a teacher, lecturer, club leader, lab supervisor or other supervising adult must countersign the submission. No research background or institutional affiliation is required of the mentor.
- Under 18: a named responsible adult is required on every route, with that adult's own email address (which must differ from the young person's), their relationship stated, and an explicit consent tick. The journal writes to the adult and waits for a reply before anything proceeds, then confirms again before publication. Consent is under Article 8 of the UK and EU GDPR and is withdrawable at any time without a reason. Correspondence goes to the adult with the young person copied, never the reverse. Authors may request publication under initials and country only, and anyone published while under 18 may switch to initials at any time after turning 18. Minimum age is 13 on every route. Full policy: https://caribbeanaijournal.org/safeguarding.html
- Teams: up to six student authors, each of whom must have done real work on the project.
- Geography: authors may be based anywhere. The research must be about the Caribbean or comparable small-island conditions.
- Formats: Student Research Article (1,500 to 4,000 words), Data Story (1,000 to 2,000), Replication Note (1,000 to 2,500), Build Note (1,200 to 3,000). All require a 150-word plain-language summary.
- Review: two working researchers plus a student reader for readability. Written feedback on every submission, including rejections. Up to two revision rounds.
- AI use: permitted and expected as a tool, with a mandatory AI use statement naming tools, versions and tasks. Model-written papers, fabricated results and invented citations end a submission.
- Award: the CAIA Young Researcher Award is given in each edition to the outstanding student contribution. Entry is automatic.

## Editions

### Vol. 1, No. 1: Inaugural Edition

Status: **Accepting papers.** Submissions close 14 September 2026, 23:59 AST. Publication December 2026.

Scope: general, across all fifteen subject areas. No single theme, deliberately, because a narrow theme in a first edition selects for whoever happened to be working on that topic this year.

Timeline: desk decisions by 28 September 2026, reviewer reports to authors by 26 October 2026, revised manuscripts due 16 November 2026, final decisions 30 November 2026, publication December 2026.

### Vol. 1, No. 2: AI and Economic Transformation

Status: call opens October 2026. Target publication Q3 2027.

Themes: AI in banking and credit with alternative scoring for financial inclusion, small business and micro-enterprise productivity, labour market and automation exposure across tourism, financial services and the public sector, tourism demand, and diaspora investment and remittance corridor analysis.

### Vol. 1, No. 3: AI Governance and Sovereignty

Status: call opens 2027. Target publication Q1 2028.

Themes: data ownership, national AI strategies, AI ethics in small states, and policy frameworks for digital sovereignty.

## Editorial board

Adrian Dunkley is founding Editor-in-Chief: a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher with more than fifteen years operating in the field, across applied ML research, production AI systems, and data governance and AI strategy. He founded StarApple AI, and is a founding figure in the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council. Where he is an author on a submission, an independent section editor handles it and he is excluded from the file.

The journal is recruiting for its remaining positions ahead of the inaugural edition: managing editor, six subject area editors covering the fifteen subject codes, a preprint moderation panel chair and moderators, a student section editor, mentor reviewers, student readers, a safeguarding lead, and international advisory board members.

Applications for every editorial role, including section heads, use one form with CV upload at https://caribbeanaijournal.org/section-heads.html#apply. Section head terms: two years renewable once, four to eight hours a month, unpaid scholarly appointment. Assessment is a documents check, then an anonymised review exercise identical for every applicant, then a conversation with the Editor-in-Chief. Editorial appointments require the applicant to be 18 or over; the student reader panel accepts applicants from 13 with a named adult. Every application receives a decision.

## Submitting

- Register first: a free contributor account is required for the article, preprint and student tracks, at https://caribbeanaijournal.org/register.html. Five checks, screened within two working days, no fee at any point.
- Peer-reviewed articles: online form at https://caribbeanaijournal.org/submit.html#portal, or by email to submissions@caribbeanaijournal.org with the subject line "Manuscript Submission, [Short Paper Title]"
- Preprints: https://caribbeanaijournal.org/preprints.html#submit
- Student submissions: https://caribbeanaijournal.org/student-research.html#submit
- Required for the article track: a separate title page with author details and ORCID iDs, a fully anonymised manuscript, a primary subject code and a primary method tag
- All three forms record the author's country of residence and their Caribbean nation or territory, chosen from a list of 34 nations and territories plus options for the diaspora, for Other, and for preferring not to say. The nation field is reported only in aggregate.
- Formats accepted: .docx or .pdf
- Acknowledgement of receipt within 3 business days, desk review outcome within 5 business days

## Key pages

- [Home](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/)
- [About the Journal](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/about.html)
- [Subject Classification](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/focus-areas.html)
- [AIC Preprints](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/preprints.html)
- [Student Researcher Section](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/student-research.html)
- [Call for Papers, Inaugural Edition](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/issues/issue-1.html)
- [Submit a Paper](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/submit.html)
- [Create a Contributor Account](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/register.html)
- [Apply to Be a Section Head](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/section-heads.html)
- [Editorial and Publishing Policies](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/policies.html)
- [Peer Review Policy](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/peer-review.html)
- [Editorial Board](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/editorial-board.html)
- [Contact](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/contact.html)
- [Privacy Statement](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/privacy.html)
- [Policies and Document Register](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/documents.html)
- [Data Protection and GDPR Policy](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/data-protection.html)
- [Safeguarding and Child Protection](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/safeguarding.html)
- [Research Ethics Policy](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/research-ethics.html)
- [AI and Research Integrity Policy](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/ai-policy.html)
- [Accessibility Statement](https://caribbeanaijournal.org/accessibility.html)
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