Submission Statement

PRE-SCREENING OF SUBMISSIONS WILL BE STRINGENT

• All submissions must pass pre-screening before being forwarded to the editorial team.
• All submissions should include sound theoretical and/or conceptual foundations: if these are absent, the manuscript WILL NOT be considered.
• Any manuscript that does not follow our Author Guidelines, or is flagged for plagiarism (checked with iThenticate), will be rejected at the submission stage.
• We do not send to reviewers papers with a similarity index higher than 15% (submissions should not be a collection of quotes, even if properly cited and referenced).
• Once an article has been rejected, an author cannot resubmit either an amendment to this article or another article for this issue of the journal.
• We will only accept one submission from any author in a particular issue and no more than two submissions, in different issues, over the course of a year. This includes both individual and shared authorship. If you submit as an individual you may not be a shared author on another submission, and vice versa. Also, if you have had a submission rejected you cannot be an author on another paper for that same issue.

AI Tools and Authorship

IAFOR follows COPE’s Position Statement on this matter:

“The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models in research publications is expanding rapidly. COPE joins organisations, such as WAME and the JAMA Network among others, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.

Official statement of COPE: Authorship and AI tools: https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author

Both the WAME guidance and COPE’s own position statement concur: AI bots should not be permitted as authors since they have no legal standing and so cannot hold copyright, be sued, or sign off on a piece of research as original. Springer Nature and Taylor & Francis have both come out with similar statements, asking authors to specify the nature of any interactions with AI in methods or acknowledgement sections.”https://publicationethics.org/news/artificial-intelligence-and-authorship

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00107-z

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. “Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics”.(COPE, February 2023)

The Use of Generative Al and Al-assisted Technologies

IAFOR follows Elsevier’s Al author policy for use of generative Al and Al-assisted technologies in writing. Authors are allowed to use generative Al and Al-assisted technologies in the writing process before submission, but only to improve the language and readability of their paper and with the appropriate disclosure. This does not apply to the use of basic tools (or bots) for checking grammar, spelling, references, and so forth. (However, please be aware of reports of these bots often being flagged as AI technologies.)

COPE Guidelines:
Authorship and contributorship
Authorship Discussion Document (Key Points on Authorship
Authorship disputes How to Handle Authorship Disputes
Authorship and AI (COPE position statement February 2023)
How potential authorship disputes are managed