Special Issues Guidelines

For an emerging field like AGI, where researchers have highly diverse background and agenda, properly managed special issues will serve an important role in surveying works on key topics, developing mutual understanding, and establishing common language for the research community.

Based on this consideration, JAGI plans to have more special issues than most journals in related fields. In this way, the journal will have two types of articles:

1. Normal issues: Submissions will be prepared according to the Aim and Scope of the journal, submitted at any time, handled according to the Reviewing and Publication Process, published as soon as the acceptance decision is made, and assembled into issues by chronicle order, with each issue has a proper length.
2. Special issues: Submissions will be prepared according to the Call for Paper of the special issue, submitted at the specified deadline, handled according to the Reviewing and Publication Process with some variations (to be explained in the following), published together in a single issue.

Each special issue starts with a proposal, which can be submitted by any member of the AGI Network (i.e., not limited to JAGI Editorial Board Members), and should contain explanations of the topic, justification of the need and timing of the special issue, names of potential authors, plus two or three Action Editors responsible for the issue as a whole (at least one of them should be in the JAGI Editorial Board).

Once the proposal is approved by the Executive Editors, a Call for Paper of the special issue will be put at the JAGI website and announced via various channels, and submissions toward it will be directed to the responsible Action Editor, not the Executive Editor who accepts "normal" submissions. The review processes of all the submissions will start altogether at the deadline (and no late submission will be considered). The review process is similar to that of the normal submissions, except that (1) some Action Editors responsible for individual submissions can also be Guest Editors who are not members of the JAGI Editorial Board, and (2) acceptance decisions for the submissions will be made at the same time. Please note that even invited submissions will need to go through the same review process, and therefore have the possibility of being rejected.

If a special issue ends up with too few submissions or accepted papers, they will be merged into normal issues, and the special issue will not be published.