Author Guidelines

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.

• The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).

• The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word,  RTF or PDF document file format.

• Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.

• The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.

• The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Content of Paper

Papers submitted to JAIR should be complete and clear. Carefully proofreading is suggested before submission. All papers are expected to have theoretical and practical values. The innovation of a paper should be on the basis of clearly analyses of their predecessors.

Papers are suggested to follow the outlines below:

• Title (100 characters or less)

• Authors Information

• Abstract (300 words or less)

• Keywords (three to five)

• Introduction

• Related Works

• Method

• Experimental Results

• Conclusion

• Acknowledgment

• References

Please follow the JAIR LaTeX Templates jair-dc.zip and jair-sc.zip to meet the detailed requirements for formatting JAIR papers. Note that the double-column publication template jair-dc.zip is only used for preparing the final presentation form of the paper after acception. Before that, please utilize the single-column submission template jair-sc.zip during preparation, submission and revision if necessary.

Submission Procedure

JAIR submission website: https://sub.ifspress.hk/index.php/JAIR/submission

Authors should register and log in first. Next, click the “Dashboard” button to enter the author dashboard. Then, click the “New Submission” button to follow the guideline of submission and upload your manuscript.

Please keep your source files safe until the final preparation stage where JAIR will require them. In addition, please make sure that the size of each file is less than the requirement in the JAIR submission website.

After submission, authors can return the author dashboard to confirm the current status of the manuscript.

Review Procedure

After submission, the chief editor of JAIR checks the paper first. If the paper meets the basic requirement of JAIR, the chief editor will assign a suitable action editor for it.

Then, the action editor selects more than two reviewers to review the paper. JAIR follows the single blind review principle, i.e., reviewers know authors while authors don’t know reviewers. JAIR believes that the single blind review can help reviewers evaluate the academic background of the paper. The time of reviewing is varying, which depends to the length and complexity of the paper, the efficiencies of reviewers, and so on. JAIR strive for the adequate and quick review procedure. If some of reviewers are overloaded, the action editor will reselect replacers for them.

Once enough review suggestions are collected, the action editor will make the final decision, i.e., Acceptance, Minor Revision, Major Revision, or Rejection. An email notification will be sent to the mail of corresponding author, which includes the final decision and review suggestions.

Authors who wish to appeal the editorial decision for their manuscript may submit a formal appeal request in accordance with the procedure outlined in ifspress’s Appeal Policy. Only one appeal per submission will be considered and the appeal decision will be final.

Our editors are not involved in making decisions about papers which:

• they have written themselves.

• have been written by family members or colleagues.

• relate to products or services in which they have an interest.

Any such submissions will be subject to the journal's usual procedures and peer review will be handled independently of the editor involved and their research group.

Publication Procedure

Once a paper obtains the Acceptance decision, authors will need to sign a copyright agreement to allows for electronic and paper publication in JAIR. The copyright agreement will be sent to the mail of corresponding author. If you have not received the copyright agreement after Acceptance, please connect the action editor as soon as possible.

Then, the paper enters the final preparation stage. In this stage, the email interactions between the action editor and corresponding author can repeat several times.

• First, authors are required to provide all of the source files of the paper under the double-column publication template, which should be editable and compileable.

• Next, the action editor returns a proofreading PDF file of the paper. Authors indicate the errors in the proofreading PDF file via highlighting and annotations. Note that only small errors can be revised in this step, such as typo and grammar errors. Revisions shaking the logic foundation of the paper cannot be accepted. If authors want to modify the paper greatly at that time, it is a reasonable option to cancel the publication and submit the modified version from scratch.

• Then, after the proofreading PDF file is approved by authors, JAIR offers authors two options to publish their research paper: Open Access and Subscription. The former ensures the paper is freely available to public readers, where an open access publication fee of 50 USD is needed. The letter provides the paper to subscribers in the exclusivity period of 2 months since its online publication, and then public readers can freely access the paper.

• Finally, an Article Publishing Charge (APC) is computed according to the final presentation form of the paper. For the paper with page count less than eight , the APC is 325 USD. For the paper whose page count is equal to or more than eight , the first seven pages cost 325 USD, and the subsequent pages cost 40 USD per page. For example, the APC of a nine-page paper is 325+2*40=405 USD. The online publication of the paper is usually within a week since the payment of APC. By experience, the page count of the same paper on the double-column publication template is about half of that on the single-column submission template. However, papers with more pages are still recommended to avoid the possible Reject decision due to insufficient contents.

Open Access Information

We offers authors two choices to publish their research:

1. Open Access:

   • Articles are freely available to both subscribers and the wider public with permitted reuse.

   • An open access publication fee is payable by authors, or their institution or funder.

2. Subscription:

   • Articles are made available to subscribers as well as developing countries and patient groups through our access programs.

   • No open access publication fee.

Your publication choice will have no effect on the peer review process or acceptance of your submission.

All articles published open access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download, copy and distribute. We currently offer the following license for this journal:

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)

Allows users to: distribute and copy the article; create extracts, abstracts, and other revised versions, adaptations or derivative works of or from an article (such as a translation); include in a collective work (such as an anthology); and text or data mine the article. These uses are permitted even for commercial purposes, provided the user: gives appropriate credit to the author(s) (with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI); includes a link to the license; indicates if changes were made; and does not represent the author(s) as endorsing the adaptation of the article or modify the article in such a way as to damage the authors' honor or reputation.

For open access publishing this journal uses an exclusive licensing agreement. Authors will retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights and ifspress will be granted publishing and distribution rights.

After receiving a final decision

Publishing agreement

Authors will be asked to complete a publishing agreement after acceptance. The corresponding author will receive a link to the online agreement by email. We advise you to read ifspress's policies related to copyright to learn more about our copyright policies and your, and your employer’s/institution’s, additional rights for subscription and open access articles.

License options

Authors will be offered open access user license options which will determine how you, and third parties, can reuse your open access article. We advise that you review these options and any funding body license requirements before selecting a license option.

Permission for copyrighted works

If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included in your article, you must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) within your article using ifspress’s permission request and license form (PDF).

Proof correction

To ensure a fast publication process we will ask you to provide proof corrections within two days.

Corresponding authors will be sent an email, requesting correction of proofs. You can edit text, comment on figures and tables and answer questions raised by our copy editor. Our service ensures a faster and less error-prone process.

You can choose to annotate and upload your edits on the PDF version of your article, if preferred. We will provide you with proofing instructions and available alternative proofing methods in our email.

The purpose of the proof is to check the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of your article text, tables and figures. Significant changes to your article at the proofing stage will only be considered with approval of the journal editor.

Responsible sharing

We encourage you to share and promote your article to give additional visibility to your work, enabling your paper to contribute to scientific progress and foster the exchange of scientific developments within your field.