AAAI Kicks off JAIR Sustainability Campaign

We are delighted to announce that AAAI has kicked off the JAIR Sustainability Campaign with a commitment to donate $150,000. The Sustainability Campaign will be used to ensure that JAIR continues its open access practices: no fees for access, no fees for authors. Our partnership with AAAI has been a critical component of JAIR’s success over the years, and we are very grateful for AAAI’s continued support.

If you are interested in supporting JAIR, please consider donating to the Sustainability Campaign. Donations of any amount are appreciated.

JAIR Reproducibility Initiative

In a recently published editorial, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) has unveiled an ambitious initiative to enhance reproducibility in AI research. Acknowledging the critical role reproducibility plays in scientific progress, JAIR has introduced four pioneering mechanisms—reproducibility checklists, structured abstracts, reproducibility badges, and reproducibility reports. These measures aim to set a new benchmark for transparency, rigor, and collaboration in the field.

The four mechanisms are designed to tackle reproducibility challenges head-on. The reproducibility checklist ensures authors systematically provide all necessary details for replicating their work, from methodological clarity to data documentation. Structured abstracts standardize how key elements of research—objectives, methods, and findings—are presented, improving accessibility for readers. Reproducibility badges reward articles that meet high standards for open data, code availability, or independent replication. Finally, reproducibility reports enable researchers to independently verify published findings, closing the feedback loop and promoting a culture of accountability and improvement.

All authors submitting articles to JAIR will be asked to fill out a reproducibility checklist and encouraged to use structured abstracts. Articles that fulfill certain criteria will receive reproducibility badges, and reproducibility reports can be submitted by anyone for any article published in JAIR.

By adopting these measures, JAIR aims to foster a culture of open science and robust research practices. For future JAIR authors, these mechanisms provide clear guidelines for producing transparent and reliable work while offering recognition for efforts to share resources and validate findings. As JAIR pioneers these changes, it sets a precedent for other journals to follow, ensuring the AI research community can confidently build upon a foundation of trust and rigor.

The mechanisms will be implemented in the journal from volume 83 that opens May 1, 2025.

Further instructions will be forthcoming for potential authors.

2025 IJCAI-JAIR Prize Awarded

We congratulate Dieuwke Hupkes, Verna Dankers, Mathijs Mul and Elia Bruni, who have been awarded the 2025 IJCAI-JAIR best paper prize for their article "Compositionality Decomposed: How do Neural Networks Generalise?", which appeared in JAIR Volume 67 (2020).

As noted in the award citation, this work addresses the fundamental question of whether neural networks can exhibit compositional generalization, a cornerstone of human cognition and symbolic reasoning. Bridging philosophical and linguistic theories with contemporary machine learning, the authors propose a suite of five rigorous, task-independent tests that define and probe compositional generalization along multiple dimensions. Their methodology reveals key strengths and weaknesses in widely-used neural architectures and has become a touchstone for research on the limits of deep learning. This work has helped establish compositional generalization as a central empirical topic in AI and continues to influence both theoretical inquiry and practical model evaluation.

The IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize is one of the most prestigious awards for a single publication in the field of AI. It has been awarded annually since 2003 to an outstanding paper published in JAIR in the last 5 calendar years, selected based on the significance of the work and the quality of the presentation.

This year's selection committee consisted of Haris Aziz, Meng Fang, Alan Fern (chair), Eleonora Giunchiglia, Gilles Pesant and Nathan Sturtevant.

Special Track on Multi-Agent Path Finding

JAIR invites submissions of original research for consideration for our new special track on Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). MAPF is the abstract combinatorial problem of computing collision-free movement plans for a team of cooperative agents. The ability to solve instances of MAPF, efficiently and effectively, is a key enabler for many current and emerging industrial applications. These include warehouse logistics, train planning, pipe routing, robotic manufacturing, and many others. For more details see the special track page at: https://www.jair.org/index.php/jair/SpecialTrack-MAPF.

Special Track Editors: Daniel Harabor, Monash University; Sven Koenig, University of California Irvine; Jingjin Yu, Rutgers University

Submission period: July 1, 2024 - May 31, 2025

Target date of completion for handling the submissions (including resubmissions): December 2025

JAIR Available in ACM Library

JAIR and ACM are very pleased to announce that JAIR articles are now being hosted by the ACM Digital Library, in addition to the JAIR.org website. While the journal will continue to be managed and published as an independent, open access journal, this partnership will provide greater visibility for JAIR articles and their authors.

Please Contribute to the JAIR Sustainability Campaign

To secure and support JAIR’s future, AI Access Foundation (JAIR’s publisher) has launched a Sustainability Campaign to raise a total of $500,000. This endowment will ensure that JAIR continues its open access practices: no fees for access, no fees for authors. JAIR’s operating expenses are very modest, since the journal is run by volunteers, but there are some yearly expenses related to hosting fees and administration. This funding will support JAIR’s operating expenses for the foreseeable future, and also allow us to invest in raising our profile within the AI community.

If you are interested in supporting JAIR and want to participate in the Sustainability Campaign, donations from organizations and individuals are being solicited. Donations of any amount are appreciated, with public acknowledgements for donations of $1000 (Friends of JAIR), $10,000 for Partners, $25k / $50k Silver and Gold Sponsors, and Platinum sponsorship for donations of $100,000 or more (see aiaccess.org/sustainability). AI Access Foundation is a non-profit 501(3)(c) public charity in California. We would greatly appreciate your support.