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Generative AI Policies

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Last updated: 28 August 2025

TECHFORUM PUBLISHING GROUP recognizes that generative artificial intelligence and AI-assisted technologies may support research, writing, editing, data analysis, software development, and scholarly communication. At the same time, these technologies may produce inaccurate, incomplete, biased, fabricated, plagiarized, or inadequately attributed content.

This policy establishes the requirements for the responsible use of generative AI across all journals published by TECHFORUM PUBLISHING GROUP. It applies to authors, reviewers, editors, editorial-board members, journal staff, production personnel, and other individuals involved in the submission, peer-review, editorial, and publication processes.

1. Purpose and Scope

For the purposes of this policy, generative AI and AI-assisted technologies include large language models, chatbots, text generators, image generators, audio and video generators, translation systems, coding assistants, automated analytical systems, and other tools capable of generating or substantially transforming content.

This policy applies to the use of such technologies for:

  • preparing or revising manuscripts;
  • generating, rewriting, translating, or summarizing text;
  • conducting literature searches or preparing literature summaries;
  • developing research questions, hypotheses, or manuscript structures;
  • collecting, processing, analyzing, or interpreting data;
  • writing, reviewing, or debugging computer code;
  • creating or modifying figures, tables, images, audio, or video;
  • preparing peer-review reports or editorial correspondence;
  • screening or processing submitted manuscripts; and
  • producing supplementary, promotional, educational, or accessibility content.

This policy supplements the publisher’s authorship, copyright, privacy, peer-review, publication-ethics, research-integrity, and corrections policies. Individual journals may establish additional discipline-specific requirements where necessary.

2. Core Principles and Human Accountability

The use of generative AI does not reduce or transfer the responsibilities of authors, reviewers, or editors. A human must remain responsible for every stage of scholarly work and publication.

The following principles apply throughout the publication process:

  • Human responsibility: Human authors are fully responsible for the originality, accuracy, integrity, validity, and lawful use of all submitted material, including content produced or modified with AI assistance.
  • Transparency: Substantive use of generative AI must be disclosed clearly and accurately.
  • Verification: AI-generated statements, interpretations, calculations, code, references, and other outputs must be independently checked by qualified human researchers.
  • Confidentiality: Unpublished manuscripts, review reports, personal data, confidential information, and proprietary research material must not be entered into external AI systems where confidentiality cannot be assured.
  • Research integrity: AI must not be used to fabricate, falsify, manipulate, conceal, or misrepresent research data, evidence, authorship, citations, images, results, or scholarly contributions.
  • Human judgment: AI output must not replace the independent intellectual judgment of authors, reviewers, or editors.

Authors, reviewers, and editors must understand that generative AI output may appear convincing while containing factual errors, invented references, incorrect interpretations, biased statements, or material derived from unidentified sources. All output must therefore be reviewed critically before it is used.

3. Permitted and Prohibited Uses by Authors

Authors may use generative AI responsibly as a supporting tool, provided that the use complies with this policy, is appropriately disclosed where required, and does not replace the authors’ intellectual contribution.

Potentially acceptable uses include:

  • developing an initial outline or organizing ideas;
  • improving readability, grammar, spelling, or language clarity;
  • translating author-written content, subject to careful human verification;
  • suggesting alternative wording for text written by the authors;
  • assisting with computer code, formulas, or analytical workflows;
  • supporting data analysis when scientifically justified and reproducible;
  • generating structured summaries for the authors’ internal use;
  • identifying possible search terms for a literature search; and
  • creating research outputs where generative AI is itself an explicitly described part of the study methodology.

The following uses are prohibited:

  • submitting a manuscript generated substantially or entirely by AI without sufficient human intellectual contribution, verification, and accountability;
  • listing an AI system, chatbot, model, software application, or tool as an author or co-author;
  • fabricating or altering research data, findings, participant information, quotations, statistical results, images, citations, or references;
  • using AI-generated references without locating, reading, and verifying the original sources;
  • using AI to conceal plagiarism, duplicate publication, image manipulation, paper-mill activity, authorship misconduct, or other unethical conduct;
  • presenting AI-generated interpretations or conclusions as verified scientific findings without independent human evaluation;
  • uploading confidential, identifiable, copyrighted, restricted, or proprietary material to an AI service without appropriate authorization and safeguards;
  • using AI to impersonate an author, reviewer, editor, participant, or other individual;
  • using AI to create false ethics approvals, consent records, research documentation, or declarations; and
  • using AI in any way that prevents the authors from accepting full responsibility for the submitted work.

Ordinary spelling correction, formatting assistance, reference-management software, and non-generative grammar checking that does not create or substantially rewrite intellectual content generally do not require disclosure. When a tool generates, rewrites, translates, summarizes, interprets, or materially changes content, its use must be disclosed.

4. Disclosure Requirements

Authors must disclose any substantive use of generative AI or AI-assisted technology during manuscript preparation, research design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, coding, translation, image production, or preparation of tables and figures.

The disclosure must be provided:

  • in the cover letter at the time of submission;
  • in the manuscript’s acknowledgements or a separate declaration when AI was used for writing, editing, translation, or manuscript organization;
  • in the Methods section when AI was used in research design, data processing, analysis, software development, coding, statistical work, or generation of research outputs; and
  • in the relevant figure, table, audio, video, or supplementary-material caption where AI was used to generate or materially modify that content.

The disclosure should identify:

  • the name of the AI tool;
  • the tool provider or developer;
  • the model or version, where available;
  • the date or period during which the tool was used;
  • the purpose for which it was used;
  • the parts of the manuscript or research process affected;
  • whether prompts, outputs, or workflows are available; and
  • how the authors reviewed, verified, and corrected the output.

Where AI use forms part of the research methodology, authors must provide enough information to permit appropriate scientific evaluation and, where reasonably possible, reproducibility. Relevant prompts, parameters, settings, generated code, validation procedures, and output-selection methods may be required in the Methods section or supplementary material.

A suitable disclosure statement is:

During the preparation of this manuscript, the authors used [tool name, provider, model or version] for [specific purpose]. The authors reviewed, verified, and edited all outputs and accept full responsibility for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of the published work.

When no generative AI or AI-assisted technology was used, the journal may request the following declaration:

The authors declare that no generative AI or AI-assisted technology was used to generate the scientific content of this manuscript.

5. Authorship, Citations, and Intellectual Property

Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors, co-authors, contributors, or members of a research group. An AI system cannot approve the final manuscript, accept responsibility for the work, respond to concerns about its integrity, disclose competing interests, sign publishing agreements, or hold and license copyright in the manner required of a human author.

All named authors must satisfy the journal’s authorship criteria and remain accountable for the entire work. Authors must not attribute responsibility to an AI system for errors, omissions, plagiarism, inaccurate references, misleading statements, or other defects.

AI-generated output must not be treated as an authoritative scholarly source merely because it was produced by an AI system. Authors must locate, read, evaluate, and cite the original scholarly or primary sources supporting each factual or scientific claim.

Authors must verify that:

  • all references exist and are accurately presented;
  • every citation supports the statement for which it is used;
  • quotations are exact and properly attributed;
  • relevant contrary evidence has not been omitted;
  • AI-generated text does not reproduce protected material without authorization;
  • all necessary permissions have been obtained; and
  • the submitted material may lawfully be published under the journal’s Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Authors must not submit AI-generated or AI-modified content when its origin, ownership, licensing status, or lawful reuse cannot be established. The authors remain responsible for all copyright, attribution, privacy, confidentiality, and licensing issues arising from their use of AI.

6. Data, Code, Images, Audio, and Video

Generative AI must not be used to fabricate, falsify, replace, obscure, or deceptively modify research data or evidence.

AI-generated or synthetic data may be used only when scientifically justified, clearly identified as synthetic, fully described in the methodology, and appropriately distinguished from observed or experimentally collected data. Authors must explain how the synthetic data were generated, validated, and used.

AI-assisted computer code may be included when:

  • the authors understand the code and can explain its operation;
  • the code has been independently tested and validated;
  • security, privacy, licensing, and dependency risks have been assessed;
  • the use of the AI tool has been disclosed where it materially contributed to the code; and
  • the authors accept responsibility for errors or consequences arising from the code.

Generative AI must not be used to add, remove, move, duplicate, obscure, or invent features in research images. This prohibition includes inappropriate alteration of microscopy images, medical images, photographs, gels, blots, spectra, maps, charts, and other evidentiary visual material.

AI-generated or substantially AI-modified images, audio, or video will normally be accepted only when their generation is an explicit and scientifically justified part of the research methodology. Such use must be described in detail, clearly labelled, disclosed in the relevant caption, and accompanied by information about the tool, model, settings, prompts, and validation process.

Authors must preserve original, unmodified research files and provide them to the journal when requested during editorial assessment or a research-integrity investigation.

7. Use by Reviewers and Editors

All journals published by TECHFORUM PUBLISHING GROUP use a single-blind peer-review process. Reviewers know the identities of the authors, while reviewer identities remain confidential. The use of AI must not compromise this confidentiality.

Reviewers must not upload a manuscript, supplementary file, review report, editorial correspondence, author information, unpublished data, or any identifiable part of a submission to a public or external generative AI tool unless the journal has expressly authorized the use of a secure system and all necessary confidentiality and data-protection safeguards are in place.

Reviewers must not delegate the intellectual work of peer review to an AI system. They must personally evaluate the manuscript’s originality, methodology, interpretation, ethical compliance, scholarly contribution, and suitability for publication.

A reviewer who is authorized to use an AI-assisted tool must:

  • comply with the journal’s confidentiality requirements;
  • disclose the tool and purpose to the handling editor;
  • verify the accuracy and appropriateness of all output;
  • ensure that the tool does not retain or use manuscript content for training;
  • avoid entering personal, confidential, or unpublished information; and
  • accept full responsibility for the submitted review.

Editors and editorial-board members are subject to the same confidentiality requirements. They must not use public generative AI tools to summarize, assess, compare, or make decisions about confidential submissions.

AI must not make final decisions regarding desk rejection, peer-review outcomes, acceptance, correction, expression of concern, or retraction. Final editorial decisions must be made by qualified human editors exercising independent judgment.

8. Publisher and Production Use

TECHFORUM PUBLISHING GROUP may use approved AI-assisted technologies for limited administrative, technical, or production purposes where appropriate safeguards and human oversight are maintained.

Such purposes may include:

  • technical manuscript checks;
  • formatting and language-quality support;
  • similarity or integrity screening;
  • metadata preparation and validation;
  • reference and identifier checking;
  • accessibility support;
  • workflow administration;
  • reviewer discovery or subject classification; and
  • preparation of clearly identified ancillary content.

The output of such tools will remain subject to appropriate human review. Automated recommendations, similarity scores, AI-detection results, or technical flags will not independently determine whether a manuscript is accepted, rejected, corrected, or retracted.

Where generative AI is used to prepare material published alongside an article, such as a plain-language summary, visual summary, translated abstract, audio summary, or educational content, the use may be disclosed where it materially affects the published output.

TECHFORUM PUBLISHING GROUP does not authorize unpublished manuscripts, peer-review reports, confidential editorial records, or personal data to be used for training external AI models without an appropriate lawful basis, suitable safeguards, and any required permission.

9. Confidentiality, Privacy, and Security

Authors, reviewers, editors, and staff must consider the terms, privacy practices, data-retention rules, security protections, and model-training practices of an AI service before using it.

The following material must not be entered into an external AI system unless its use is lawful, authorized, and adequately protected:

  • unpublished manuscripts and proposals;
  • peer-review reports and editorial decisions;
  • personal or identifiable participant information;
  • confidential clinical or patient information;
  • proprietary datasets or commercially sensitive information;
  • information subject to confidentiality agreements;
  • restricted, embargoed, or export-controlled information;
  • copyrighted material that the user is not authorized to upload; and
  • login credentials, security information, or private correspondence.

Removal of names alone may not sufficiently anonymize a manuscript, dataset, or review. Individuals using AI tools must consider whether the remaining information could identify a person, institution, project, or unpublished study.

Any suspected loss, unauthorized disclosure, or misuse of confidential material through an AI system must be reported promptly to the journal or publisher.

10. Non-Compliance, Corrections, and Investigations

Editors may request additional information about the use of generative AI at any stage of submission, review, production, or post-publication assessment. Authors may be asked to provide prompts, outputs, revision histories, original data, unmodified images, code, tool settings, validation records, or other supporting information.

The journal will not treat an automated AI-detection result as conclusive evidence by itself. Concerns will be evaluated through editorial assessment, examination of the manuscript and supporting records, communication with the authors, and other relevant evidence.

Undisclosed, misleading, deceptive, or prohibited use of generative AI may result in:

  • a request for clarification or correction;
  • return of the manuscript for revision;
  • rejection of the manuscript;
  • withdrawal of an acceptance decision;
  • termination of a reviewer or editorial assignment;
  • publication of a correction, expression of concern, or retraction;
  • restriction of future submissions or participation in journal activities; or
  • notification of an author’s institution, funder, ethics committee, or another appropriate body where serious misconduct is reasonably established.

Actions will be proportionate to the nature, extent, intent, and effect of the non-compliance. Honest and appropriately disclosed use of AI will be distinguished from deceptive use intended to fabricate evidence, conceal misconduct, misrepresent authorship, or interfere with editorial evaluation.

11. Policy Review and Contact

Generative AI technologies and related legal, ethical, and scholarly standards continue to develop. TECHFORUM PUBLISHING GROUP may revise this policy to address new technologies, risks, professional guidance, and publishing practices.

The version of the policy in effect at the time of submission will normally govern the manuscript, although updated requirements may be applied where necessary to protect confidentiality, research integrity, legal compliance, or the reliability of the scholarly record.

Questions regarding acceptable AI use should be raised with the relevant journal before submission or before an AI tool is used in a confidential editorial or peer-review activity.

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Enquiries may also be submitted through the publisher’s official Contact page.