AI Use & Disclosure

Last updated: 26 June 2026

WASTE uses artificial intelligence in its editorial workflow and discloses that use openly, in line with the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). AI accelerates desk checks; human editors make publication decisions.

How WASTE uses AI

Submitted manuscripts pass through an automated “AI desk check” that classifies the submission type, checks for required sections, screens for ethics, data, and statistical-reporting issues, produces a completeness score and risk flags, and drafts an author fix-list and an editor brief.

Human oversight (human-in-the-loop)

• The AI desk check performs initial screening only. It never accepts, rejects, publishes, or mints a DOI on its own.
• A human editor reviews every AI output, verifies its flags, and makes all editorial decisions. AI recommendations are advisory and are clearly labelled as such.
• The screening model and its prompts are tested before use, and its limitations (it can misclassify or miss issues) are understood by our editors.

Confidentiality of submissions

To run the desk check, submitted manuscript text is sent to a third-party large-language-model API provider (currently OpenAI; the journal may use other providers such as Anthropic's Claude) solely to generate the screening result. By submitting, authors consent to this processing. We do not make submissions public by default, and we choose providers whose API terms do not use submitted content to train their models.

AI cannot be an author

Large-language-model tools cannot be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work, declare conflicts of interest, or manage copyright. Every submission must have accountable human authors.

Author disclosure

Authors must disclose, in the Materials and Methods (or an equivalent) section, any AI tools used in the research or in preparing the manuscript — including writing assistance, figure or image generation, and data collection or analysis — and describe how they were used.

Reviewers and editors

Reviewers and editors must not use generative AI to write their assessments or decision letters, and must not upload manuscripts to external AI tools in any way that breaches confidentiality. Peer review is a human judgment.

Questions

Questions about our AI practices can be sent to ethics@wastejournal.org.