Terms of Use

These terms govern the use of caribbeanaijournal.org, the content published on it, and contributor accounts. They are written to be read, and the shortest accurate summary is: read anything, reuse it with attribution, be honest about what you submit, and do not scrape the site into the ground.

1. Reading and Reuse

• Everything published is open access, free to read, with no registration, no login, no paywall and no metering.
• Articles are licensed CC BY 4.0 unless the article says otherwise. You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build on them, including commercially, provided you credit the authors and the journal and indicate any changes.
• Preprints carry the licence the author chose, shown on each record. Four options are available and they are not interchangeable; check before you reuse.
• Authors keep copyright in their work. The journal holds a licence to publish, not ownership.
• Site design, branding and editorial apparatus — the AIC name, the layout, the classification scheme, this text — remain with the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association. Use of the journal's name or marks in a way suggesting endorsement requires permission.
• Text and data mining of published content is permitted under the article licence, at a courteous rate. See section 5.

2. Contributor Account Terms

These terms apply to everyone who holds an account created through the registration form.

What you agree to

1. One account, one person, your real name. Accounts are not shared, not transferred, and not held under a pseudonym. A research group registers its individual members, not the group.
2. Accurate information, kept current. Affiliation, email and competing interests are updated when they change.
3. A human stands behind every submission. You can explain the analysis, defend the results, and answer a question about the methods. This obligation is set out in the AI and research integrity policy and is the one we take most seriously.
4. You hold the rights to everything you submit, including third-party material inside it.
5. Honest declarations. Competing interests, funding, AI use, ethical approval and consent are declared truthfully. A false declaration is misconduct independent of anything else about the submission.
6. Rate limits. No more than three submissions from one account in a day, and no bulk deposit of near-identical manuscripts.
7. Age. You are 13 or over. If you are under 18, a named adult has given verified consent under the safeguarding policy, and that consent must be in place before the account is active.

What we agree to

1. The account is free, permanently. No fee to register, submit, publish or read. If that ever changed, existing accounts would be honoured under these terms.
2. Screening within two working days, against the five published checks and nothing else.
3. A reason with every refusal, and one appeal in writing to the Editor-in-Chief.
4. Your data is handled as the data protection and GDPR policy describes, and not otherwise. Nothing is sold, rented or shared for marketing.
5. No automated decisions. A named human decides on your account and on every submission you make.
6. Closure on request, at any time, with unconditional deletion of everything except work already published.

Suspension and closure

We may suspend or close an account for: a false declaration; submitting work an author cannot stand behind; plagiarism or duplicate submission; fabricated citations or results; abuse or harassment of staff, editors or reviewers; automated or bulk submission; or attempting to hold more than one account. Suspension is notified with reasons, and you may appeal once in writing to the Editor-in-Chief. Appeal decisions are final. Closure does not remove published work, for the reasons set out in the erasure section of the data protection policy.

3. Submissions

• Submitting does not oblige us to publish, and nothing here creates an expectation of acceptance.
• Submission grants the journal a licence to process, screen, review and, if accepted, publish the work. It transfers no copyright.
• Screening is not peer review. A moderated preprint carries no endorsement of its findings, and the record says so on its face.
• Announced preprint versions are permanent and cannot be deleted. Withdrawal posts a notice as a final version rather than removing the record.
• Editorial decisions rest with the editors. Appeals go through the complaints and appeals procedure, once.

4. Conduct

Applies to correspondence with the editorial office, to peer review, and to any communication with editors, reviewers, students or mentors. Do not: harass, threaten or abuse anyone connected with the journal; attempt to identify an anonymous reviewer; disclose a confidential manuscript; contact an author under 18 outside the channels in the safeguarding policy; or misrepresent your identity, affiliation or qualifications. Breach ends an account or an appointment, and the relevant institution may be told.

5. Technical Use of the Site

• Crawling and mining are permitted at a reasonable rate, with a descriptive user agent and a contact address. Honour robots.txt.
• Rate: no more than one request per second sustained. If you need a bulk copy of the corpus, write to us and we will arrange it rather than have you hammer the server.
• Machine-readable summaries are published at llms.txt, feed.xml and sitemap.xml. Use them in preference to scraping pages.
• Not permitted: attempting to gain unauthorised access, probing for vulnerabilities without contacting us first, denial of service, or interfering with anyone else's use of the site.
• Security research is welcome if you tell us first at editor@caribbeanaijournal.org and give us a reasonable window to fix what you find. We will not pursue anyone who does that in good faith.

6. Disclaimers and Liability

Published research represents the views of its authors, not of the journal, the editorial board or the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association. Peer review reduces error; it does not eliminate it. Preprints are not peer reviewed at all, and the record says so on every preprint page.

Nothing published here is professional advice. Do not make a clinical, financial, legal or policy decision on the basis of a paper without competent professional judgement applied to your own circumstances. Where a paper reports a deployed system, its performance in one context is evidence about that context and not a guarantee about yours.

The site is provided as it is. We work to keep it accurate and available, and we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. To the extent the law permits, the journal and the Association are not liable for loss arising from use of the site or reliance on anything published on it. Nothing in these terms limits liability for anything that cannot lawfully be limited.

7. Links

You may link to any page here without permission, and we would rather you linked than copied. Links from this site to others are provided for reference and are not an endorsement; we do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

8. Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of Jamaica, where the publisher is constituted, and the courts of Jamaica have jurisdiction over any dispute. This does not deprive you of any protection under the mandatory law of your own country of residence, and in particular it does not affect your right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority where you live. See the complaints section of the data protection policy.

9. Changes

Reviewed annually and updated when the journal's practice changes. Every version carries a number and a date, and superseded versions are available on request. Material changes are announced here and in the document register at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the site after a change takes effect indicates acceptance; if you do not accept a change, you may close your account and ask for your data to be deleted.