Join the Editorial Board
Apply to Be a Section Head
Six section head posts are open, along with the managing editor role, the preprint moderation panel, the student section and the reviewer pool. Applications are assessed on a rolling basis and every one receives a decision.
A journal is only as good as the people who decide what it publishes. AIC is appointing six section heads, each holding editorial responsibility for a group of subject codes, along with preprint moderators, a student section editor, and a standing reviewer pool. This page sets out what the roles involve, who is eligible, how we assess applications, and the form that starts the process.
What a Section Head Does
A section head owns the quality of everything the journal publishes inside their subject codes. In practice the work divides into five duties.
| Duty | What it means in practice | Typical load |
|---|---|---|
| Desk assessment | Read each new submission in your codes and decide within five working days whether it goes to review, goes back for revision, or is declined. A declined manuscript gets a reason, always. | 2–6 manuscripts a month |
| Reviewer selection | Find two independent reviewers with the right expertise and no competing interest, then chase them when they go quiet. This is the part that takes real time. | 1–2 hours per manuscript |
| Decision drafting | Synthesise reviewer reports into a decision letter the author can act on. Where reviewers disagree, you adjudicate rather than passing the disagreement to the author. | 1 hour per manuscript |
| Section development | Commission work in the gaps, propose special collections, and recruit reviewers into the pool for your codes. | Ongoing |
| Board participation | One editorial board meeting each quarter, held online and scheduled around Caribbean time zones, plus a vote on policy changes. | 2 hours a quarter |
Realistically the role costs four to eight hours a month outside a submission peak, and more in the four weeks before an edition closes. It is an unpaid scholarly appointment, as section editorships are at nearly every journal, and it carries a named place on the masthead, a term of appointment, and a formal reference from the Editor-in-Chief on request.
Sections Currently Open
The fifteen subject areas in the classification scheme are grouped into six editorial sections. Every one of them is open.
| Section | Codes | Expertise sought |
|---|---|---|
| Climate, Energy and Environment | cai.CLM cai.NRG cai.AGR | Climate modelling, meteorology, remote sensing, disaster risk, energy systems, agricultural and fisheries science |
| Economy, Finance and Enterprise | cai.FIN cai.SME cai.TUR | Development economics, credit and insurance risk, informal economies, tourism analytics, the blue economy |
| Governance, Law and Society | cai.GOV cai.SOC cai.MIG | Public administration, AI regulation and data protection law, ethics, human rights, migration and demography |
| Health, Education and Human Development | cai.MED cai.EDU | Clinical and public health informatics, epidemiology, education technology, workforce and skills research |
| Infrastructure, Data Systems and Security | cai.INF cai.SEC | Distributed systems, compute and connectivity constraints, data engineering, cybersecurity, border and safety systems |
| Methods, Benchmarks and Culture | cai.MTH cai.CUL | Machine learning methodology, benchmark and dataset construction, natural language processing for Creole languages, computational humanities |
Eligibility
You are eligible to apply for a section head post if you meet all three of the following.
- Demonstrable expertise in the section's codes. Evidenced by a peer-reviewed publication record, a doctorate or a doctorate in progress, or at least five years of senior applied practice in the subject area. Applied practice counts on its own.
- Evidence you can assess other people's work. Prior peer review for a journal or conference, thesis examination, grant assessment, a technical review role in industry, or supervision of research students. If you have never reviewed, say so and apply to the reviewer pool first. That is the normal path in.
- Capacity to hold the deadlines above, honestly assessed. A section head who disappears for two months does more damage than a vacancy.
We do not require a Caribbean address, Caribbean nationality, or an institutional affiliation. We do require that you understand why research designed for large states often fails when it is dropped into a country of three hundred thousand people, and the application asks you to demonstrate that directly.
How Applications Are Assessed
Acknowledgement, within 3 business days
Your application is logged and you receive a reference. Every application receives a decision, including the unsuccessful ones.
Eligibility and documents check, within 10 business days
The editorial office confirms the three eligibility criteria against your CV and publication list, and notes any competing interests you have declared.
Review exercise
Shortlisted applicants receive one anonymised manuscript in their codes and write a short reviewer report on it, to a two-week deadline. This is the heart of the assessment, and it is the same exercise for every applicant.
Conversation with the Editor-in-Chief
Forty-five minutes online covering your reading of the exercise manuscript, your plan for the section, and your availability.
Appointment
A written terms of reference, an initial term of two years renewable once, and your name, affiliation and codes published on the editorial board page.
Terms of Reference
Section heads are appointed under a written terms of reference, adopted by the editorial board on 19 June 2026 and published in the document register. The binding parts are these.
- Term. Two years from appointment, renewable once by agreement. Either side may end the appointment with one month's notice, and any manuscript in flight is reassigned rather than dropped.
- Independence. Section heads decide on scholarly merit alone. Neither the Editor-in-Chief nor the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association may direct a decision on a specific manuscript, and no funder, sponsor or advertiser has any editorial role whatsoever.
- Competing interests. You must declare and recuse yourself from any manuscript by a current colleague, a co-author within the last three years, a student or supervisor, a close personal relation, or anyone with whom you have a financial relationship. Your own submissions to AIC are handled by a different section head, and you are excluded from the file entirely.
- Confidentiality. Manuscripts under review are confidential. You may not share, cite, use or circulate an unpublished manuscript, and you may not feed it into any third-party system that retains or trains on submitted content. The AI and research integrity policy governs what tooling is permitted in editorial work.
- Data protection. You will handle personal data belonging to authors and reviewers. Appointment is conditional on accepting the confidentiality and data handling undertaking in the data protection and GDPR policy, and on completing the short safeguarding briefing if you handle student submissions.
- Conduct. The code of conduct in the editorial policies applies. Discriminatory, retaliatory or abusive conduct ends an appointment immediately.
Other Roles Open
The same form handles every editorial role. Choose the role you want in the first field.
| Role | What it involves | Commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Section Head | Editorial responsibility for a group of subject codes, as set out above | 4–8 hours a month |
| Managing Editor | Day-to-day editorial operations, reviewer coordination and production across all three tracks | 8–12 hours a month |
| Preprint Moderator | Screening preprints against the seven published moderation criteria. Admissibility only, not merit. | 2–4 hours a week |
| Student Section Editor | Running the student researcher section, including mentor liaison and the feedback that students receive whatever the decision. Requires safeguarding clearance. | 4–6 hours a month |
| Reviewer | Two to four manuscripts a year in your area of expertise, with a three-week turnaround on each | 4–8 hours per manuscript |
| Statistical or Methods Reviewer | Specialist scrutiny of study design, inference and model evaluation, called in on manuscripts where the methods carry the claim | By invitation |
| Advisory Board Member | Strategic guidance on scope, indexing and regional partnerships. No manuscript handling. | 2 hours a quarter |
Applicants Under 18
Editorial roles carry responsibility for other people's unpublished work and personal data, so every editorial appointment requires the applicant to be 18 or over. If you are under 18 and want to be involved in the journal, two routes are genuinely open to you: submit your own research through the student researcher section, or join the student reader panel, which reads student submissions alongside the two working researchers and tells us whether a paper is followable. The reader panel accepts applicants from 13 upwards, and the form below handles it. Where an applicant is under 18 we require a named responsible adult, that adult's own email address, and their consent, exactly as the student submission form does. The safeguarding policy explains what we do with that information and what we will not do.
Editorial Role Application
One form for every editorial role. Rolling assessment, decisions on all applications. Upload a CV and, where you have one, a publication list. Read the terms of reference before you begin.