Generative AI Tools

IOP Publishing follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) position statement that AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.

There are many responsible and appropriate uses for generative AI within scholarly research and we support authors using it in this manner. When doing so, authors are encouraged to be transparent about their use of any generative AI tools in either the research or the drafting of the manuscript. Authors are also encouraged to maintain records of previous drafts, as well as any prompts used in the editing or generation of material within their manuscript.

Authors are responsible for ensuring that any written or visual content produced by or edited using a generative AI technology meets all IOP Publishing’s guidelines and policies. All AI-generated content must be checked to ensure it is accurate and free from plagiarism. Generative AI tools cannot be used to create, alter or manipulate original research data and results such as blots or measurements. Any generative AI tools used to create figures from data, such as graphs or charts, should be listed in the figure caption.

In cases where text in a manuscript has been generated, authors must ensure that they have critically revised this work for important intellectual content in order to meet the authorship criteria followed by IOP Publishing and set out by the International Council of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Before using any AI tools, authors should carefully check the tool’s terms and conditions—especially sections about ownership, reuse, and opting out—to avoid giving away any rights over their work by accident. Authors must not use any AI tools that would limit how they, IOP Publishing, or anyone else can use their submitted work. If authors choose to use an AI tool, they must make sure that the AI tool and its provider only obtain rights that are necessary to provide the requested service, and that they do not obtain additional rights, such as the right to use the work to “train” the AI tool.