JAIR (ISSN 1076 - 9757) covers all areas of artificial intelligence (AI), publishing refereed research articles, survey articles, and technical notes. Established in 1993 as one of the first scientific journals on the Web, JAIR is indexed by INSPEC, Science Citation Index, and MathSciNet. JAIR reviews papers within approximately three months of submission and publishes accepted articles on the internet immediately upon receiving the final versions. JAIR is an open access journal and articles are published for free distribution on the internet by the AI Access Foundation as described in our Transparent Publishing policy. For further information about the journal, please see our FAQ.

Editorial Charter

The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) is dedicated to the rapid dissemination of important research results to the global artificial intelligence (AI) community. The journal’s scope encompasses all areas of AI, including agents and multi-agent systems, automated reasoning, constraint processing and search, knowledge representation, machine learning, natural language, planning and scheduling, robotics and vision, and uncertainty in AI.

Articles published in JAIR must meet the highest quality standards, as measured by originality and significance of the contribution, and the clarity of exposition. Papers should describe work that has both practical and theoretical significance. Authors must clearly articulate all claims, and support them by empirical experiments or theoretical analyses. When appropriate, we encourage authors to implement their work and demonstrate its utility on significant problems; any experiments reported should be reproducible. Papers describing systems should clearly describe their contributions and the principles underlying them. Papers describing theoretical results should also discuss their practical utility. In general, it should be clear how the work advances the current state of understanding, why the advance matters, and how these advances can be exploited in practice or by other researchers. Papers should report on what was learned in doing the work, rather than merely what was done.

Authors must clearly acknowledge the contributions of their predecessors. If a paper introduces new terminology or techniques, it should also explain why current terminology or techniques are insufficient.

We encourage authors to be concise. Short, high-quality articles are welcome, in addition to the more lengthy articles that traditionally appear in AI journals. JAIR also publishes research notes and survey articles. Research notes are very brief papers that extend or evaluate previous work. Research notes typically focus on a very specific problem or technique already acknowledged in the literature to be of some significance. Survey articles are tutorials or literature reviews that contribute an analysis or perspective that advance our understanding of the subject matter and make it accessible to a broad community of researchers or practitioners. Given the importance of survey articles, JAIR has a separate set of Guidelines for Survey Articles.

All potential authors should refer to our Information for Authors and detailed Submission Requirements prior to submission.

Open Access Publication Policy

All JAIR articles are open access. JAIR began publishing in 1993, and helped pioneer the "Diamond Open Access" model on the Web. The journal is community-supported -- articles are freely available and no publication fees are charged to authors. 

All articles published on or after May 1, 2023 are available under the terms the Creative Commons CC BY license. All articles published prior to that date (i.e., articles in volumes 1 through 76) are available under the terms of the JAIR License Version 1.

Survey Articles

Surveys Editor: Min-Yen Kan

JAIR is committed to publishing high-quality survey articles of broad interest to researchers in artificial intelligence and those who wish to apply concepts and methods from AI to other areas of research or applications. All survey articles undergo the same rigorous review process as regular research articles and are held to the same standards of significance, relevance, and technical and expository quality.

The purpose of a survey paper is to address one or more of the following issues: (1) analyze a significant body of AI research and make it more accessible to a broader audience; (2) position existing research results in a broader context and explain their impact; (3) bring together previously unconnected lines of research in a way that fosters new research directions in these areas; (4) identify deficiencies or gaps in current knowledge that need to be addressed in future research. Surveys will be judged on their scope, clarity, and novelty of perspective, as well as the relevance and currency of the subfield or lines of research being surveyed. All articles published in JAIR are expected to adhere to its high standards of exposition and presentation; however, clarity, organization and accessibility are particularly important for survey papers.

Policy On Special Tracks

JAIR will occasionally publish special tracks or virtual collections. Each special track will have a separate page on JAIR's web site that includes a preface written by the editors of the special track, a table of contents and links to the papers. The papers included in the special track will be handled by its editors, but they will go to production and appear online asynchronously as soon as they are ready. Once the papers designated for the special track are published, the virtual collection will be created.

Special Track Process

Special tracks can be proposed by a group of editors that include at least one current or former JAIR Associate Editor, who will serve as the "contact editor" for the special track.

A written proposal for a special track should be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief, outlining the motivation for, intended content, timetable and editors of the special track. The proposal will be circulated to JAIR's Advisory Board and Associate Editors for comment. A final decision will be made by the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor-in-Chief within one month of the proposal submission.

Once selected, the editors of the special track will be responsible for advertising the call for papers and setting up a period of time during which papers can be submitted. This period will include the earliest time and deadline for submission of papers to be considered for the special track. This information should be clearly indicated in the call for papers.

All the papers submitted to a special track will be submitted via the normal web-based process. Each paper should clearly identify the special track it is submitted for in a note under "Special information for editors" on the submission form.

Papers submitted to a special track will be assigned in JAIR's tracking system to the contact editor of the special track, who will coordinate their handling with the other editors.

The editors of a special track may co-author some of the submissions, but these submissions will be assigned to an Associated Editor who is not editing the special track.

The review process will be conducted following the usual procedure (with reviewer selection and acceptance decisions made by the editors of the special track and coordinated by the contact editor). The standard JAIR policies and form letters should be used. JAIR will keep track of the process and send reminders to the reviewers as done with all other papers. The turn-around period for JAIR papers is between 2-3 months and we expect it to remain the same for papers submitted to special tracks.

Decisions will conform to the usual JAIR standards, with at most two rounds of reviewing. Papers that require a major revision will not be accepted, but the authors could be encouraged to resubmit the paper. While we usually don't limit the time period for major revisions, in the case of a special track, authors will get no more than a few months to resubmit the paper. The exact period will be determined by the editors of the special track.

Accepted papers will go to production and will be published as soon as they are ready. Papers will be published first as part of a usual JAIR pipeline and placed online.

As soon as all the bulk of the papers designated for a special track are published, the editors will provide a preface, and the virtual collection will be created. The appearance of the virtual collection will be announced together with the usual JAIR's announcements of newly published papers. Papers submitted for the special track that are still under review when the virtual collection appears will be added when they are published.