Generative AI Policies

Advances in Public Law and Crime (PLICE)

Ethical guidance for authors, reviewers, and editors on the responsible, transparent, and accountable use of generative AI in legal and socio-legal scholarship.

Policy Overview

Human Accountability

Authors remain fully responsible for accuracy, originality, legal reasoning, ethical compliance, and all submitted content.

Transparency

Substantive use of generative AI must be disclosed clearly in the manuscript or author statement.

Confidentiality

Unpublished manuscripts, reviewer reports, legal data, and editorial materials must not be uploaded to public AI tools.

Verification

All AI-assisted facts, references, citations, cases, statutes, and interpretations must be independently verified.

This policy aims to ensure that the use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies supports academic quality without compromising research integrity, authorship accountability, originality, confidentiality, transparency, data protection, legal-source accuracy, and ethical responsibility. PLICE supports responsible technological innovation while maintaining strict standards for legal scholarship, publication ethics, peer-review integrity, and editorial independence.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of producing, transforming, summarizing, translating, analyzing, or organizing content based on user prompts. This may include text, images, tables, computer code, statistical interpretation, summaries, references, visual materials, or other forms of academic content. AI-assisted technologies include tools used for language editing, grammar correction, translation support, reference organization, coding assistance, data processing, image generation, and activities that may influence the preparation or presentation of scholarly work.

Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies only as supporting tools in manuscript preparation. Acceptable uses may include improving language clarity, grammar, readability, structure, formatting, translation support, coding assistance, preliminary idea organization, and non-substantive editorial refinement. Such use must not replace the author’s intellectual contribution, legal reasoning, methodological responsibility, critical analysis, interpretation of findings, or scholarly judgment.

Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, validity, integrity, ethical compliance, and scholarly quality of all submitted and published content. Any AI-assisted output must be carefully reviewed, verified, corrected, edited, and approved by the authors before submission.

Generative AI tools, large language models, chatbots, software systems, or any non-human technologies cannot be listed as authors or co-authors. Authorship requires human accountability, responsibility for the integrity of the work, approval of the final manuscript, disclosure of conflicts of interest, response to reviewer comments, and ethical compliance. Since AI tools cannot assume these responsibilities, they do not meet the criteria for authorship.

Authors must disclose the use of generative AI or AI-assisted technologies when such tools are used beyond basic spelling, grammar, formatting, or reference management. Disclosure is required when AI tools contribute to text generation, translation, summarization, data interpretation support, literature mapping, coding assistance, figure preparation, image generation, or other substantive elements of the manuscript.

The disclosure should identify the tool used, describe the purpose of use, and confirm that the authors reviewed, edited, verified, and approved the final content.

6. Permitted Use

• Language editing, grammar correction, and readability improvement.
• Translation support, provided that the final legal meaning is verified by the authors.
• Formatting assistance, structure refinement, and non-substantive editorial polishing.
• Assistance with coding, data cleaning, or technical workflow, provided that all outputs are validated.
• Preliminary literature organization, provided that all sources and references are independently verified.
• Preparation of visual or graphical materials, only when disclosed and not used to misrepresent evidence.

7. Prohibited Use

• Using AI to fabricate data, findings, citations, legal cases, quotations, respondents, or research evidence.
• Submitting AI-generated text without human verification, scholarly contribution, and proper disclosure.
• Using AI to create false statutes, unverifiable references, inaccurate legal claims, or unsupported arguments.
• Using AI to manipulate images, figures, tables, datasets, or research results in a misleading manner.
• Using AI to hide plagiarism, duplicate publication, text recycling, or unethical authorship practices.
• Using hidden prompts, invisible text, or prompt-injection techniques to manipulate editorial screening or peer review.

8. AI-Generated Images and Visual Materials

The use of AI-generated or AI-modified images, figures, graphical abstracts, diagrams, illustrations, or visual materials must be disclosed clearly. Authors must ensure that such materials do not misrepresent data, create false evidence, alter research results, violate copyright, infringe privacy, or mislead readers.

9. Verification of Data, Legal Sources, and References

Authors are responsible for verifying all AI-assisted outputs, including facts, citations, legislation, court decisions, legal principles, references, quotations, tables, data summaries, theoretical claims, and methodological statements. AI-generated references must not be included unless independently verified through reliable databases, publisher websites, DOI records, official repositories, or authoritative legal sources.

10. Use of Generative AI by Reviewers

Reviewers must treat manuscripts, supplementary files, reviewer reports, author responses, editorial correspondence, and unpublished research materials as confidential documents. Reviewers must not upload submitted manuscripts or unpublished materials into public or third-party generative AI tools.

Reviewers must not rely on generative AI to replace expert assessment, evaluate novelty, judge methodology, interpret findings, or make review recommendations.

11. Use of Generative AI by Editors

Editors must protect the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts, author information, reviewer identities, reviewer reports, editorial correspondence, decision letters, and unpublished research materials. Editors must not upload confidential manuscript content or editorial decision materials into public or third-party generative AI tools.

Editorial decisions must be made by human editors based on journal scope, reviewer recommendations, ethical assessment, originality, methodological rigor, legal contribution, and compliance with publication standards.