Privacy and Data Protection

This statement explains what personal data Artificial Intelligence in the Caribbean (AIC) collects, why it is collected, how it is used, and what rights you have over it. It covers visitors to this website, authors, reviewers, mentors, student authors and editorial board members.

Data controller: Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association, publisher of AIC.
Data protection contact: editor@caribbeanaijournal.org

What We Collect

Cookies and Tracking

This website sets no cookies and runs no advertising, analytics, or cross-site tracking scripts. There is nothing to consent to and no tracking to opt out of.

Two categories of content are loaded from third parties, which necessarily discloses your IP address to those providers:

• Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com) for typefaces.
• Unsplash (images.unsplash.com) for photographic imagery.

Neither is used by AIC to identify or profile you. Both are governed by their own privacy policies. We intend to self-host these assets so that no third-party request is made at all.

The Online Submission Forms

The site carries three submission forms: the manuscript form on the Submit a Paper page, the preprint form on the Preprints page, and the student form on the Student Researcher Section page. All three transmit over HTTPS and are stored by Netlify, the platform that hosts this site, which acts as a data processor on our instructions. Submissions are retrieved from there by the editorial office.

• What is stored: everything you enter in the form, together with every file you upload. Across the three forms that can include the title and type of the work, author and co-author names, email address, affiliation, country of residence, Caribbean nation or territory, ORCID iD, abstract or plain-language summary, keywords, subject and method codes, licence choice, cover notes, data provenance and AI use statements, your declarations, and the manuscript, title page and supplementary files themselves.
• Student submissions: the student form additionally stores the author's age at submission, level of study, school or university, and the name, email address and role of the supervising mentor. Where an author is under 18, we also record the mentor's confirmation that a parent or guardian has consented to publication. Student authors may ask to be published under initials and country only, and that request is recorded with the submission.
• Caribbean nation or territory: this field is collected to report, in aggregate and without naming anyone, which parts of the region the journal is reaching. It is never published against an individual without their agreement, and every form offers a "prefer not to say" option.
• Where it is stored: on Netlify infrastructure, which is located in the United States. Submitting the form therefore involves an international transfer of your data.
• Spam screening: Netlify applies automated spam filtering to form submissions, including a hidden decoy field that people never see and bots tend to complete. No profiling or automated decision-making is applied to your manuscript.
• Cookies: the form sets none. It is a plain HTML form and works with JavaScript disabled.
• Retention: submissions are exported into the editorial record and deleted from the Netlify form store once the work reaches a decision. The retention periods below then govern the editorial copy. Records relating to authors under 18 are kept no longer than records relating to any other author, and the mentor and guardian details are deleted once the editorial record is closed.

If you would rather not use a form, email your work to submissions@caribbeanaijournal.org instead, or to preprints@caribbeanaijournal.org or students@caribbeanaijournal.org for the other two tracks. Every route reaches the same editors and is treated identically.

Lawful Basis

• Contract and pre-contractual steps, covering processing of author and reviewer data in order to run peer review and publish accepted work.
• Legitimate interests, covering keeping the site secure and available, and maintaining a reviewer pool.
• Consent, covering publication of biographies and contact details of editorial board members, and any optional listing you ask us to publish. Consent may be withdrawn at any time.
• Legal obligation, covering retention of records necessary to address research integrity allegations.

Who We Share Data With

AIC does not sell, rent, or trade personal data, and does not share it for marketing purposes. Data is disclosed only in these circumstances:

• Peer review. Anonymised manuscripts are sent to reviewers. Under double-blind review, author identities are withheld from reviewers and reviewer identities are withheld from authors.
• Publication. Author names, affiliations, ORCID iDs, biographies, and correspondence addresses are published with the article, as is standard scholarly practice, and are transmitted to indexing services and persistent-identifier registries.
• Service providers. Hosting, form processing, and email providers process data on our instructions and may not use it for their own purposes. Our website host and form processor is Netlify; see The Online Submission Form above.
• Research integrity. Where misconduct is substantiated, relevant records may be disclosed to the affected institution or funder in line with COPE guidance.
• Legal requirement. Where disclosure is required by law.

Retention

• Published articles and their metadata: retained permanently. The scholarly record is not erasable, and this is a recognised limit on the right to erasure.
• Rejected and withdrawn manuscripts and their review records: retained for five years to allow integrity allegations to be investigated, then deleted.
• Reviewer and board records: retained while active and for two years thereafter, or until you ask to be removed.
• General correspondence: retained for two years.
• Server logs: retained for up to 90 days.

Your Rights

Subject to applicable law, including the Jamaican Data Protection Act and the EU and UK GDPR where they apply, you may request: access to the personal data we hold about you; correction of inaccurate data; erasure; restriction of processing; a portable copy; and objection to processing based on legitimate interests. Where processing is based on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting prior processing.

To exercise any of these rights, email editor@caribbeanaijournal.org. We respond within 30 days. If you are dissatisfied with our response, you may complain to your national data protection authority.

Note the limit on erasure above: once an article is published, the authorship record cannot be removed without destroying the integrity of the scholarly record.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Manuscripts and correspondence are held in access-controlled editorial accounts limited to editors handling the submission. Reviewers are instructed not to retain manuscripts after completing a review, and not to upload manuscripts to third-party AI systems that retain or train on submitted content.

Children and Young People

The journal publishes research by authors as young as thirteen through the student researcher section, so we do hold personal data about young people, deliberately and under specific protections.

The minimum age is 13 on every route. We do not register, correspond with, or hold data on anyone younger. Between 13 and 17, taking part requires a named adult — a parent, legal guardian, teacher or school-appointed supervisor — who gives their own email address and whose consent we verify by writing to them and waiting for a reply. Nothing proceeds until it arrives. This is consent under Article 8 of the UK and EU GDPR, and it can be withdrawn at any time without a reason.

Four protections apply to everyone under 18: we collect name, age, email, school and country and nothing else; every message goes to the named adult with the young person copied, never the reverse; publication shows name, school and country at most, and initials on request; and unsuccessful submissions are deleted at 12 months rather than the 24 that applies to adults. Anyone who was under 18 when their work was published may ask, on reaching 18, to have their name replaced with initials, and we do it without asking why.

The full detail is in the safeguarding policy, which is written for parents and teachers as much as for editors, and in section 6 of the data protection policy.

Changes to This Statement

Material changes are published on this page and in the document register at least 30 days before they take effect, with a revised version number and date. Where a change materially affects how we handle data you have already given us, we contact you directly, and where the change affects processing that rests on your consent, we ask again rather than assume. Every superseded version is retained and available on request.