Last updated - December 13, 2024
ACS Publications recognizes that there are a myriad of AI tools available, and our policy is designed to guide their responsible use while maintaining the integrity and excellence of scientific publishing in ACS journals. Authors using AI tools should use them transparently and ethically, in accordance with the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research and following the best practices and policies detailed below. Authors are responsible for all submitted content including the accuracy of AI-generated content as well as referencing associated material as appropriate.
Transparency
All use of AI tools should be disclosed within the submission. As stated in each journal's Author Guidelines: "The use of AI tools for text or image generation should be disclosed in the manuscript within the Acknowledgment section with a description of when and how the tools were used. For more substantial use cases or descriptions of AI tool use, authors should provide full details within the Methods or other appropriate section of the manuscript."
Authorship
AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility and accountability for the published work. As such, AI tools should not be included in the authorship list. Instead, AI tools should be acknowledged and mentioned transparently (as described above).
Graphics
As stated in each journal's Author Guidelines: "The use of AI tools for text or image generation should be disclosed in the manuscript within the Acknowledgments section with a description of when and how the tools were used. For more substantial use cases or descriptions of AI tool use, authors should provide full details within the Methods or other appropriate section of the manuscript.” For graphics, a brief description of AI use should be included in the figure caption to explain to readers how the image was created.
Journal cover art: The use of AI tools for image generation in cover artwork is permitted but should be disclosed in the cover art caption submitted alongside the artwork file. Please name the specific tool(s) used and include a brief description of how the tools were used. Authors are responsible for ensuring that the terms of use for all tool(s) permit commercial use and that the output is not owned by the generating website. For questions about whether specific tools are appropriate for use on ACS journal covers, please send the name of the tool and a link to its terms of use to ACSPubsMultimedia@acs.org.
Table of Contents (ToC) graphics: AI-generated images should not be used within Table of Contents (ToC) graphics, as they do not have captions immediately adjacent to the image where the use of AI can be transparently explained.
Editorial Discretion
The editor may, at their discretion, determine that the AI use in a given submission is too extensive, including (but not limited to) AI tools used to generate substantive commentary or extensive literature reviews. This determination may result in manuscript rejection or a request for revision to remove or reduce AI-generated portions of the manuscript.
AI Use as a Peer Reviewer
ACS Publications journals ask for the expert opinion of consulted reviewers and expect that those opinions are those solely of the reviewer (with occasional exceptions noted in the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research). Additionally, third party services such as AI tools may store or use any information provided as a prompt to generate future text, which could result in a breach of the confidentiality of the peer review process. As stated in the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research "A reviewer should treat both the manuscript and data received from the journal, their review report, and related correspondence, as confidential". Disclosing any part of the submission or the peer review report itself to a text generation service (or any other third-party tool) is a breach of this confidentiality, and thus a violation of the ACS Ethical Guidelines.
