Ethical Principles and Publication Policy

The Ethical Principles and Publication Policy for the Iraqi Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (IJAIML) are designed to maintain the highest standards of integrity, transparency, and scientific quality in scholarly publishing. The journal strictly aligns its workflows with global best practices, following the core recommendations established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and standard open-access principles.

1. Duties and Responsibilities of the Editorial Board

The editorial team holds full authority and institutional responsibility for the complete lifecycle of submitted manuscripts:

  • Publication Decisions: The Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editors evaluate manuscripts based solely on their scientific merit, originality, clarity, and relevance to the journal’s scope, completely independent of the authors' race, nationality, institutional affiliation, or gender.

  • Confidentiality: Editors and editorial staff must maintain strict confidentiality regarding all submitted manuscripts. No information about a submission may be disclosed to anyone other than the corresponding author, designated peer reviewers, and internal editorial advisors.

  • Conflict of Interest: Editors must recuse themselves from managing or processing any manuscript in which they have a competing financial, institutional, or personal interest.

  • Anonymity Preservation: The editorial office actively maintains the integrity of the double-blind review system by ensuring that the identities of both the authors and the reviewers remain protected throughout the entire evaluation loop.

2. Duties and Responsibilities of Peer Reviewers

Reviewers act as crucial gatekeepers of the journal's scientific rigor and technical accuracy:

  • Contribution to Editorial Decisions: Reviewers are expected to provide objective, honest, and highly constructive evaluations within the designated deadline to assist the editorial board in making informed publication choices.

  • Confidentiality & Data Protection: Manuscripts received for peer review are legally protected, confidential documents. Reviewers must not copy, share, or use unpublished data, ideas, or methodologies from the manuscripts for personal or professional advantage.

  • Objectivity & Constructive Argumentation: Reviews must be conducted professionally and objectively. Personal criticisms directed at authors are strictly unacceptable; all negative or positive feedback must be supported by clear, evidentiary academic reasoning.

  • Disclosing Competing Interests: Reviewers must decline a review assignment immediately if they recognize a potential conflict of interest, whether originating from past collaborations, competitive research alignments, or shared institutional backgrounds.

3. Duties and Responsibilities of Authors

Authors bear full accountability for the accuracy and authenticity of the research they present:

  • Originality & Plagiarism: Authors must guarantee that their submitted manuscript is an entirely original work. Every external data point, quote, figure, or theory must be accurately cited using the journal's standard citation style. Plagiarism in any form—including text recycling (self-plagiarism)—constitutes severe academic misconduct.

  • Data Integrity & Reproducibility: Authors must present an accurate account of their experimental work, raw datasets, and statistical findings. Fabricating, falsifying, or deliberately manipulating machine learning model performance indices, charts, or training metrics is strictly prohibited.

  • Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Submission: Submitting the same core research paper to more than one journal concurrently is an unethical publishing practice. A manuscript under review at IJAIML must not be simultaneously considered elsewhere.

  • Authorship and Contributorship: Authorship must be limited strictly to individuals who have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the conception, execution, layout design, data analysis, or writing of the study. All co-authors must approve the final version of the manuscript and consent to its formal submission for publication.

  • Transparent Disclosure of AI Technologies: In line with specialized AI/ML publishing frameworks, the use of generative artificial intelligence tools (such as LLMs for text editing, drafting, or code generation) must be transparently declared within the methodology or acknowledgment sections. Crucially, AI tools cannot be listed as authors or co-authors.

4. Dealing with Research Misconduct and Retractions

IJAIML takes a proactive stance against all violations of publishing ethics:

  • Investigation Protocols: If an allegation or suspicion of misconduct (such as plagiarism, duplicate publication, or data manipulation) is raised either before or after publication, the Editorial Board will initiate a formal investigation following COPE workflow standards.

  • Sanctions and Corrections: Confirmed ethics violations will result in immediate administrative action. Depending on the severity, this may include immediate rejection of the under-review manuscript, formal notification to the authors' institutional scientific affairs boards, or a permanent public Retraction Notice published on the OJS portal to protect the scientific record.

  • Post-Publication Corrections: The journal is always committed to publishing official corrections, clarifications, and errata if inadvertent technical errors are identified in published articles.