Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about the Institute, the curation system, the journal Persistence, and how submissions work. For full policy, see Publication Ethics, Review Process, and Author Guidelines.
What is ICSAC?
The Institute for Complexity Science and Advanced Computing — an independent research institute, Indiana LLC, founded 2026. ICSAC runs a free, fully public open-review curation system across the material sciences and publishes the journal Persistence, online first, with an annual print edition.
How does ICSAC review work?
Every submission moves through two stages. The AI panel — five independent reviewer slots, two passes — evaluates the work against a public six-dimension rubric and produces a recommendation. The recommendation is then routed to the curation team, real people, who confirm or override it. The curation team's call is the verdict. Nothing publishes, no decision email goes out, and no deposit is staged until the curation team has acted. Full process at /review-process.
What is the curation system?
ICSAC's open-source review apparatus. It includes the AI panel orchestration, citation verification, the Review Quality Control audit, and the curation team-mediated dispatch layer. The complete codebase — prompts, scoring code, decision logic — is published openly at github.com/ICSAC/editorial-system (mirrored at huggingface.co/spaces/ICSAC-Institute/editorial-system). Read it, audit it, fork it, run it on your own corpus.
How do I submit a paper to ICSAC?
Two routes. DOI route: paste a Zenodo DOI, an arXiv DOI or an arXiv ID and the system fetches the deposited version. Upload route: upload a PDF with extractable text; a preprint on any other server comes this way, with its DOI. Both require an ORCID identifier. No fees of any kind. See /submit and /author-guidelines for the full submission flow.
What are ICSAC's review criteria?
A public, fixed six-dimension rubric, scored 1–5 per reviewer: Domain Fit, Methodological Transparency, Internal Consistency, Citation Integrity, Novelty Signal, and Generative-Artifact Assessment. See /review-process for the per-dimension definitions and how scores roll up to a panel recommendation.
Are there submission, review, or publication fees?
No. ICSAC does not charge submission fees, article-processing charges (APCs), or any other fee. Free for authors. No surcharges, no waivers required, no institutional billing.
Do I keep copyright on my paper?
Yes. Authors retain full copyright on submitted work. Default license is CC-BY 4.0; CC-BY-SA 4.0 and CC0 1.0 are also accepted. ICSAC takes a non-exclusive license to publish the curation record and include the work in the annual Persistence compilation. See /terms.
How long does review take?
Typically 5 to 10 days from intake to the curation team's verdict. The AI panel completes in minutes; the curation team review is the human-paced step. The decision email carries the full panel report and the RQC audit as PDF attachments.
What is Persistence?
ICSAC's open-review transdisciplinary journal. Every accepted paper is published in it online first, the day its DOI registers; a trade paperback and ebook of each volume follows as the annual print edition. The first print edition, Volume 1, Number 1, ships May 2027. Scope is the material sciences. The curation record for each accepted paper stays free online at icsacinstitute.org/publications/<slug>; the annual is the printed product.
How do I cite an ICSAC paper?
Three artifacts, three citations. The work (at its DOI, as an article of Persistence: volume and article number for papers registered under the Institute's prefix). The curation record (icsacinstitute.org/publications/<slug>). The Persistence print edition (book-chapter style with ISBN, available once Vol 1 ships). Every paper page has a "How to cite this paper" block with copy-paste Plain text, BibTeX, and RIS for each form. See /how-to-cite.
What scope does ICSAC accept?
Material sciences — natural, formal, computational, and quantitative-social. Examples in scope: complexity science, information theory, nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, dynamical systems, computing and AI, mathematical biology, theoretical neuroscience, quantitative social science. Humanities and qualitative-only submissions fall outside scope.
Can I use AI to write or assist my paper?
Yes, as a tool — AI is unremarkable for drafting, editing, generating figures, running analyses, checking math. AI replacing human thinking is not accepted; submissions where the underlying analysis appears generated rather than authored will be declined. Submissions must be clean (no residual prompts, hallucinated citations, "as an AI language model" disclaimers). AI-use disclosure is encouraged but not required. See /publication-ethics.
Where are accepted papers archived?
The full curation record — panel reviews and the RQC audit — is published at icsacinstitute.org/publications/<slug> as a permanent public URL. Every accepted paper receives a DOI under the Institute's own prefix. Upload-route papers are also archived on Zenodo (CERN); a DOI-route paper's preprint keeps its own DOI, linked to the published article. The five founding papers, published before the prefix existed, keep their Zenodo DOIs. Authors retain copyright; the paper is published in Persistence online first and is eligible for the annual print and ebook edition under the same per-article license.
Who reviews submissions?
The AI panel — five independent reviewer slots evaluating against the published rubric, two independent passes. The curation team (real people) then reviews every panel recommendation alongside the manuscript and either confirms or overrides it. The curation team's call is the verdict. No paper publishes without a curation team decision.
What is the curation team?
The human-in-loop role in ICSAC's curation model. The curation team reads the panel's full record alongside every submitted manuscript and produces the verdict — confirming or overriding the panel's recommendation. Distinct from a traditional curator: the curation team does not solicit reviewers (the AI panel does that work), but the curation team is the authoritative final decision-maker on every submission.
Where does the source code live?
github.com/ICSAC/editorial-system (also mirrored at huggingface.co/spaces/ICSAC-Institute/editorial-system). Open license. The complete curation system — prompts, six-dimension rubric, scoring code, panel orchestration, RQC audit, citation verification, curation-team dispatch, and the templates that render decision emails — is published there. Auditable, forkable, runnable.
What is RQC?
Review Quality Control — a second-pass audit of the AI panel's own review against ICSAC's published rubric. RQC checks the panel for rubric adherence, internal consistency, specificity, tone, and its use of the verification evidence (the citation checks and the code package digest) before the recommendation is finalized. The RQC audit publishes alongside the panel reviews in every accepted paper's curation record.