Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  • You have chosen the correct Section (i.e., track) for the paper - articles, surveys, special track, etc. This is essential to identify the right set of reviewers.
  • You have read the JAIR Open Access Publication Agreement (https://www.jair.org/index.php/jair/PublicationAgreement) and if your article is published, you will agree to all the terms specified in the agreement.
  • The manuscript describes new methods, results or insights that will be considered important by the global artificial intelligence (AI) community or a well-established sub-community. We urge authors who have not previously published in JAIR to read several JAIR articles related to their work to get a feeling for the kind of content published by our journal.
  • As described in our submission requirements, the work must be original and unpublished. All claims should be clearly articulated and supported by appropriate empirical evidence or theoretical analyses. The paper meets all of JAIR's submission requirements (see https://jair.org/index.php/jair/about/submissions).
  • This is either a first time submission, or you are resubmitting your paper after making modifications suggested by the editor. In the latter case, please indicate this (including the submission number of the original paper and the name of the Associate Editor who handled it) in the comments section below. Also, you should upload a PDF file (choose the type "Responses to Reviews") with a detailed description of the changes you made in response to the editor's and reviewers' comments.
  • The manuscript is not under review or published elsewhere. The only exception is for substantially extended versions of conference or workshop papers that have been published or accepted for publication (i.e., the final version has been submitted and approved for publication).
  • The manuscript has been carefully proof-read and edited for language, clarity and technical content. We urge authors who have not previously published in JAIR to read several JAIR articles to get a feeling for what is expected in this regard.

  • The manuscript has been formatted according to the requirements described at https://jair.org/index.php/jair/about/submissions#formatting-submission and is being submitted in PDF format; this requirement is strictly enforced, in order to (a) prevent work caused by careless resubmissions of papers rejected elsewhere, (b) reduce time between acceptance and publication in JAIR.
  • The manuscript does not fall into one of the following categories, which usually have a high probability of summary rejection:

    - Papers rejected from a conference or other journal that have not undergone extensive revisions and improvements.

    - Papers that are better suited for publication in a more specialised venue, e.g., because the results are incremental or only of interest to a very narrow audience.

    - Surveys that merely summarise a selection of existing literature without providing new insights or conceptual contributions; this includes most surveys closely based on related work sections of student theses.

    - Papers merely apply known AI techniques to a problem or problem area, but do not provide insights or methodological contributions of significant interest to the AI research community (these are better suited for publication in a venue aligned with the application area).

    - Papers that are insufficiently grounded in the state of the art in an established area of AI (as often evident from a lack of suitable, recent references).
  • Please answer the following three questions in the comments section below (required).

    1. Please state in no more than 150 words why your work is important to other researchers in Artificial Intelligence and how they could make use of your results.

    2. Please list 1 - 3 papers previously published in JAIR that are closest to your work, and explain in no more than 150 words how your work differs from those papers. If you consider no previous articles in JAIR to be sufficiently close to your work, please state this and instead list a previous JAIR publication that has a similar structure to your submission. Please note that articles with little similarity in content or structure to published JAIR articles have a high chance of rejection without review.

    3. If any part of this paper has been previously published or is under review, please state where and explain how the current paper differs. If not, please state "No" as the response. If this is a resubmission to JAIR, please also provide here the original submission number and the name of the Associate Editor who previously handled it. This will make it easier for us to use (whenever possible), the same AE and reviewers, to ensure consistency of the reviewing process.

    Submissions for which these three questions are not clearly answered will not be considered for publication in JAIR.

Author Guidelines

JAIR invites submissions in all areas of AI. Articles published in JAIR must meet the highest quality standards as measured by originality and significance of the contribution. The journal publishes full-length original articles, research notes, survey articles, and special tracks. Research notes are very brief papers that extend or evaluate previous work. Survey articles are tutorials or literature reviews that contribute an analysis or perspective that advances our understanding of the subject matter. Special tracks are collections of articles on a specific subject edited by guest editors. All articles must conform to the standards outlined in JAIR's editorial charter.

Submission requirements

We strongly encourage authors to be concise.

Because of JAIR’s quick turnaround time, authors may be tempted to "test the waters" with papers that are less than they might be. Authors should submit only papers that have been carefully proofread and polished. Papers that are clearly unacceptable will be returned by the editor without being reviewed.

All claims should be clearly articulated and supported either by empirical experiments or theoretical analyses. When appropriate, authors are encouraged to implement their work and to demonstrate its utility on significant problems; any experiments reported should be reproducible. Papers describing systems should clearly describe the contributions or the principles underlying the system. Papers describing theoretical results should also discuss their practical utility. In general, it should be clear how the work advances the current state of understanding and why the advance matters. Papers should report on what was learned in doing the work, rather than merely on what was done.

Authors must clearly acknowledge the contributions of their predecessors. If a paper introduces new terminology or techniques, it should also explain why current terminology or techniques are insufficient.

Submissions must be original. The work cannot have been published previously or be pending publication in another journal, nor can it be under review or be sent for review in any other forum. Violation of this policy will result in rejection of the submission and a six-month ban on further submissions to JAIR. Submissions to JAIR can, however, contain material published in one or more conference papers. In this case, the JAIR submission should contain additional, unpublished, information, and provide a more complete presentation of the work. Needless to say, it should be different enough from the original conference paper also to avoid copyright infringement issues. The journal format affords you the opportunity to include additional significant information such as new experiments, proofs, results or analysis that did not fit before and to incorporate additional background information or discussion. Authors submitting a paper that extends a paper previously published at a conference or accepted but not yet published at a conference must notify the editor at the time of submission to JAIR.

Published articles may be accompanied by online appendices containing data, demonstrations, instructions for obtaining source code, or the source code itself (if appropriate). We strongly encourage authors to include such appendices along with their articles. (Note: if an online appendix contains source code, we will require you to sign a release form prior to publication freeing us from liability.)  Online appendices are not included in the review process.

Submissions that use color are welcome, but all figures should be understandable by readers viewing or printing via monochrome devices. We cannot guarantee that referees will review the color version of your work.

Submission procedure

To submit a paper to JAIR,  first register for an account (https://jair.org/index.php/jair/user/register), and then please submit the paper online here (or https://jair.org/index.php/jair/submission/wizard). You will be asked for the basic information about the paper (title, authors, contact information, abstract, etc.).  You will also be asked to confirm several declarations about your understanding of the submission requirements.  The last item in the form contains 3 survey questions.  Replying to these questions is a mandatory part of the submission procedure, and yor submission cannot be processed without these answers.  The online form also explains how to transfer your PDF file to us. There is no charge to submit a paper, nor are there any any publication fees once an article is accepted.

Although we have no strict threshold requirement, we recommend that authors attempt to minimize the size of submitted files. Very large files (more than 15 megabytes) still present a problem for some mailers and printers.  Submitted papers should also conform with the formatting requirements described below.

JAIR seeks to acknowledge receipt of submissions within three business days. If you do not receive such a confirmation message, please let the editorial office know by sending a message to editors@jair.org.

The Reviewing Process

To promote rapid publication of research results, articles sent to JAIR will be reviewed and a decision returned to the authors in approximately 8-12 weeks. If an article is longer than usual, or is submitted during the reviewing period or occurrence of a major conference, we may require more time for the review.  JAIR publishes, on a regular basis, detailed metrics on its submission handling process, including empirical likelihoods for all evaluation outcomes and average times for reaching these outcomes. This transparent publishing approach is intended to provide useful information to prospective authors and valuable calibration to the editorial team and to reviewers.

Reviewers are instructed to make recommendations to accept, accept with minor revisions, reject with resubmission encouraged, or reject. If a paper requires substantial revisions, it will not be accepted. In this case, the editor may recommend that the author submit a revised version, but there is no guarantee it will be reviewed by the same referees, or that it will eventually be published. A paper may be revised and resubmitted at most once. To avoid misunderstandings about interpretation of reviewer and editor recommendations, we encourage authors to contact the editor prior to resubmission with any salient questions.

If a paper is accepted, the editor and reviewers may require minor revisions. The author should return the revised paper as soon as possible. Normally, authors will have up to two months to accomplish their revisions. Upon receiving a revised paper, the editor may ask the reviewers to re-review the revised paper. Electronic publication will occur immediately upon receipt of the final version of an accepted article.

Reviewer Anonymity and Confidentiality

All persons involved in the reviewing process are requested to treat submissions in strict confidence. Maintaining the confidentiality of submissions and the anonymity of reviewers is crucial to JAIR's peer review process. The best quality reviews are obtained when the reviewers can comment candidly, knowing that their comments will only be disclosed to those directly involved in the decision-making process. It is the policy of JAIR therefore that reviewers, editors, and administrators keep the identities of all reviewers hidden from authors, other reviewers, and other editors who are not handling the paper. As a courtesy to reviewers, once all the reviews have been received, the editor handling the paper generally sends all the anonymous reviews to all the reviewers. This is done after all identifying information is removed. If further discussion between the editor and the reviewers ensues, reviewers must be identified by their IDs rather than their names. Under some circumstances, it may be necessary or beneficial to divulge the identities of the reviewers to the other reviewers of the same manuscript. This will only be done after consent is obtained from all affected reviewers.

Resubmissions

As explained earlier, if a paper requires substantial revisions, the editor may reject the paper and recommend that the author submit a revised version. However, JAIR papers may only be resubmitted once.

When sending JAIR a resubmission, authors should NOT send the paper directly back to the editor; instead, they should use JAIR’s regular procedure for sending us a submission. This enables JAIR’s administrative staff to track the paper. The online form provides a mechanism whereby the author can identify the paper as a resubmission. The paper will be forwarded to an appropriate editor (normally the original editor) by JAIR’s staff.

Formatting

Formatting for submission

As stated above, authors should submit a PDF file for review. The submitted article should adhere to the JAIR publication format. If the paper is accepted, authors will be asked to fix any minor formatting issues prior to publication (as described below). Papers submitted in a different format (e.g., a conference format) will be rejected without review.

Formatting for publication

Authors are responsible for formatting their papers for publication, in PDF, according to the JAIR guidelnes. JAIR’s editorial staff will provide guidance in the final preparation, but the primary responsibility for proper formatting lies with the author. The editorial staff can recommend professionals who will provide this service for a fee.

The JAIR Instructions for Final Preparation: Authors Guide contains instructions that the authors should follow when preparing their paper for publication, as well as a checklist. Please pay close attention to these instructions. The guide includes detailed formatting instructions and describes how to access sample formats, and templates for several typesetting systems (e.g., LaTeX and Word).

All JAIR articles are open access. As described in the Instructions for Final Preparation: Authors Guide, each paper must include a copyright notice referencing the Creative Commons CC BY license.

Authors may submit their JAIR papers to arXiv and similar services, but should ensure that the archived version has the proper metadata for their JAIR publication, including the JAIR volume number, pages, and DOI.  Authors are also encouraged to add links to the article and the JAIR site to their personal web pages.

After publication

Authors may publish "forward pointers" to subsequent articles on the same topic by contacting the managing editor.