JCAIS Preprints

What This Is

A preprint is a complete piece of research that its authors have made public before, or alongside, peer review. The practice has been standard in physics, mathematics and computer science since arXiv began in 1991, and it has since spread to biology, medicine, chemistry and the social sciences. Its purpose is simple: research that sits in a review queue for eight months helps nobody, and the author who circulated the idea first should be the one credited with it.

JCAIS Preprints applies that model to the Caribbean. It is a regional server in the tradition of arXiv, and closer still in spirit to AfricArXiv, which was built on the argument that a region should own the infrastructure that holds its scholarship rather than rent it from elsewhere. Caribbean researchers are frequently working against a hurricane season, a budget cycle, a health emergency or an election. Eight months is often the whole window.

Why Post One

• Priority. The announcement date is a permanent public record that the work was yours on that day.
• Speed. Two working days from submission to a citable identifier, against several months for a reviewed article.
• Feedback before commitment. Readers find errors that reviewers would have found later, while there is still time to fix them cheaply.
• Funder and thesis compliance. Many grants and postgraduate programmes now require open deposit of outputs.
• Reach. Preprints are indexed, discoverable and free to read from any connection, including the ones that cannot afford a subscription.
• No penalty at this journal. Posting a preprint here or anywhere else does not disqualify a manuscript from JCAIS peer review. It never has.

Scope and Eligibility

The server accepts research that applies machine learning or artificial intelligence to the Caribbean, to Small Island Developing States, or to small-state conditions the region shares. Every preprint carries one primary code and up to three cross-list codes from the JCAIS subject classification, which runs on two axes: fifteen Caribbean subject areas and twelve method tags.

We accept research articles, data and methods notes, replication reports, working papers, theses and dissertations, conference papers, and technical reports. We accept manuscripts already under review elsewhere and manuscripts already published, provided the author holds the right to deposit the version submitted.

Following the practice arXiv adopted for computer science in 2025, we do not accept review articles or position papers on the preprint server unless they have already passed peer review at a journal or conference. Unreviewed surveys are the single largest source of low-value submissions on every server that permits them. Send an unreviewed review article to the journal instead, where it will be read properly.

Endorsement

First-time submitters need an endorsement. This is the mechanism arXiv uses to establish that a submitter is working within a scholarly community, and it is why arXiv stopped treating an institutional email address as sufficient on its own in January 2026. Automated and machine-generated submissions almost all arrive from first-time posters, and an unendorsed server drowns.

You do not need an endorsement if any of the following applies:

• You have previously had a preprint announced on this server
• You have published a peer-reviewed article in JCAIS or in any indexed journal
• You are a member in good standing of the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association
• A co-author on the submission meets any of the above

If none applies, name a proposed endorser on the submission form, or ask the moderation panel to find one for you at preprints@caribbeanaijournal.org. We will not leave a genuine researcher stranded for want of a contact, and endorsement is free.

Students: secondary school, sixth form and undergraduate authors do not need an endorsement and should not chase one. Use the Student Researcher Section, which is built for you and gives you written feedback the preprint server cannot.

How It Works

Moderation Criteria

Moderators decide one question: does this belong on the server. They do not assess whether the findings are right, and they do not provide reviewer-style feedback, because that is not what this track is for. A submission is accepted when it meets all of the following.

Rejected submissions are not announced. The decision names the criterion that failed, without a critique of the work. You may appeal once, in writing, to the Editor-in-Chief. Appeal decisions are final. Repeated rejections lead to closer scrutiny of later submissions from the same author.

Machine-Generated Manuscripts

Every preprint server in operation is now dealing with submissions written by language models and presented as original research. Our position is narrow and enforceable. Use AI tools as freely as you use a compiler or a statistics package, and describe that use in the manuscript: which tool, which version, for which task. What we reject is a manuscript whose argument, analysis or results were produced by a model that no author has verified. If a moderator cannot establish that a human stands behind the claims, the submission does not go up. See the generative AI policy for the full text.

Licensing and Your Rights

You keep copyright in everything you post here. When you submit, you choose one of four licences, and your choice is displayed on the preprint record.

All four are irrevocable for versions already announced. That is the price of a permanent scholarly record, and every serious server works this way.

Withdrawal

Announced preprints are not deleted. If work is superseded, wrong, or withdrawn for any other reason, submit a withdrawal notice and we post it as a final version explaining the withdrawal. The identifier keeps resolving, the earlier versions stay readable, and anyone who cited the work can see what happened. Records are removed outright only where the law requires it, for example a confirmed copyright infringement or an unlawful disclosure of personal data.

Preprints and the Journal

The two tracks are separate and deliberately so. Posting a preprint carries no obligation to submit it to JCAIS, and submitting to JCAIS carries no obligation to post a preprint. You may do both on the same day. If your preprint is later accepted for a JCAIS edition, the peer-reviewed version of record is published in the edition and cross-linked to the preprint, and the preprint record notes that review took place.

Moderation of a preprint gives it no standing in peer review. Editors and reviewers assess a submitted manuscript on its merits and are not told that a preprint version exists unless the authors mention it themselves.