Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage Policy

Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Generative AI Policy

Digitus: Journal of Computer Science Applications supports responsible AI use while maintaining human accountability, research integrity, confidentiality, transparency, reproducibility, and responsible computing practices.

HUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY AI DISCLOSURE CONFIDENTIALITY
✓ AI may assist manuscript preparation and technical workflows. ✓ Meaningful AI use must be disclosed.
✓ Authors remain fully responsible for all content, code, data, and analyses. ✕ AI tools cannot be authors or co-authors.
✕ Reviewers/editors must not upload confidential manuscripts, code, or datasets to public AI systems. ✕ AI must not replace human scientific, technical, or editorial judgment.
1. Use of AI by Authors

Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to support activities such as language improvement, literature organization, idea development, code assistance, debugging, documentation, data exploration, visualization, or manuscript preparation. AI tools must not replace the authors' critical thinking, scientific judgment, technical validation, analysis, interpretation, software-engineering responsibility, or original contribution.

Authors are responsible for:

  • verifying factual accuracy and checking references generated by AI;
  • reviewing, testing, and substantially editing AI-assisted content and source code;
  • checking for bias, hallucination, fabricated citations, insecure code, technical errors, or misleading information;
  • validating AI-generated algorithms, scripts, models, outputs, datasets, or visualizations before use;
  • protecting confidential, personal, copyrighted, proprietary, security-sensitive, and unpublished data; and
  • ensuring that the final manuscript, code, analysis, and conclusions represent the authors' own scholarly work.
Important: Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, security, reproducibility, integrity, and ethical compliance of all submitted content, regardless of whether AI tools were used.
2. AI Disclosure

Meaningful use of generative AI in manuscript preparation, programming, data processing, model development, visualization, or analysis must be disclosed in a separate AI Declaration. The declaration should identify the tool or model used, its purpose, the tasks performed, and the extent of human review, testing, validation, and oversight.

Suggested AI Declaration
The authors used [tool/model name and version] for [specific purpose]. All AI-assisted outputs, including text, code, analyses, or visualizations where applicable, were critically reviewed, independently verified, tested, and substantially revised by the authors. The authors take full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, originality, security, and reproducibility of the manuscript.

Basic spelling, grammar, punctuation, or conventional code-formatting assistance does not normally require disclosure. If AI forms part of the research method, algorithm, software system, dataset generation, model training, experimentation, or data analysis, its use must be described in sufficient technical detail in the Methods section.

3. AI and Authorship

AI tools, chatbots, code assistants, autonomous agents, and language models must not be listed as authors or co-authors. Authorship requires human responsibility for the integrity of the work, approval of the final manuscript, accountability for its scientific and technical content, and the ability to respond to questions regarding the research, algorithms, software, data, analyses, and conclusions.

4. AI-Generated Images, Figures, Visualizations & Digital Artifacts

Generative AI must not be used to create, manipulate, obscure, remove, or introduce features in research images, screenshots, system outputs, benchmark results, diagrams, graphs, interface captures, or figures submitted as empirical evidence in a manner that misrepresents the underlying research.

AI-assisted enhancement or transformation must not alter the scientific meaning, experimental result, system behavior, measured output, or evidentiary value of a figure.

An exception may apply when AI-assisted image generation, computer vision, synthetic-data generation, visualization, or digital-content generation is part of the research design or methodology. In such cases, authors must describe the tool, model/version, prompts or parameters where relevant, procedure, validation method, and its role in generating or interpreting research data in the Methods section.

5. Use of AI by Reviewers

Submitted manuscripts are confidential documents. Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, manuscript excerpts, source code, datasets, system architecture, supplementary files, unpublished algorithms, credentials, proprietary information, or review reports into public generative AI systems.

Peer review is a human scholarly responsibility. AI tools must not be used to generate scientific assessments, independently evaluate algorithmic or methodological quality, determine manuscript validity, or produce review recommendations. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the accuracy, fairness, confidentiality, and integrity of their reports.

6. Use of AI by Editors

Editors must not upload submitted manuscripts, source code, datasets, confidential correspondence, reviewer reports, proprietary technical material, unpublished algorithms, or editorial decision letters into public generative AI systems.

AI must not replace human editorial judgment or be used to determine acceptance, revision, or rejection. Editors remain fully responsible for scientific assessment, technical evaluation, communication, research-integrity decisions, and final publication decisions.

7. AI in the Publication Workflow

The journal may use appropriately controlled AI-assisted technologies for limited technical and administrative purposes, provided that appropriate safeguards, confidentiality protections, validation, and human oversight are maintained.

✓ Technical submission checks ✓ Duplicate-submission detection
✓ Research-integrity screening ✓ Reviewer matching support
✓ Copyediting and production assistance ✓ Identification of technical inconsistencies
✓ Metadata and formatting support ✓ Preliminary code or data-consistency checks where appropriate
Human oversight remains mandatory throughout all editorial and publication processes.

Violations & Consequences

Misuse, undisclosed use, deceptive use, or unsafe use of AI may be handled under the journal's publication-ethics procedures. Depending on severity, actions may include request for clarification, requirement for additional validation, manuscript rejection, correction, retraction, institutional notification, or restrictions on future submissions.

Policy Governance

This policy follows principles of transparency, accountability, confidentiality, human oversight, fairness, intellectual-property protection, cybersecurity, reproducibility, responsible computing, and research integrity. It will be reviewed periodically as AI technologies, software-development practices, cybersecurity risks, and international publication standards evolve.