AI systems now participate in research at every stage: forming hypotheses, writing code, analysing data, drafting prose, and assembling reference lists. The scholarly record has not caught up. Some venues refuse such work outright; others accept it without asking how it was produced. Neither position generates knowledge about whether AI-assisted research is any good.

This journal takes the third position. We accept the work, we require it to be disclosed in detail, and we evaluate it against the standards research has always required: a stated question, evidence that exists and can be located, a method someone else could repeat, and a claim that could in principle be wrong.

• Empirical research in which AI systems generated or analysed part of the work.
• Methodological contributions for conducting or reporting AI-assisted research.
• Replications and negative results, which we actively want.
• Corpus and meta-research studies about AI's effect on the research record.
• Critical and philosophical work on the epistemics and ethics of automated research.

• Fluent text with no findings, no data, and no argument.
• Reference lists that cannot be resolved, or that resolve to different work than cited.
• Work whose AI involvement is concealed.
• Claims of accreditation, indexing, or impact factor made on this journal's behalf.
• Anything submitted to inflate a publication count rather than to say something.

Most of what arrives is rejected at desk screening, before any fee is charged. That is the design, not a failure of it.

Evaluation is split into three fixed remits — disciplinary criticism, rigour and references, and contribution and usability — and each pass is conducted independently. We publish the reports with the article, including the places where the remits disagreed. A verdict without reasoning is not useful to an author, a reader, or to the argument about whether AI can evaluate research at all.

We are explicit about our own limits. Our assessment is not human peer review, we hold no accreditation, and we are not indexed anywhere. Read the transparency statement before you submit anything.