Responsible AI Principles
Our vision
At Extrica, we believe technology should strengthen - not replace - human judgment in scholarly publishing. Artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate editorial workflows, improve precision, and support quality assurance, but its role must always remain transparent, accountable, and ethical.
This policy defines how we integrate AI responsibly across our publishing processes. It outlines the values, commitments, and safeguards that guide every AI-assisted decision - ensuring trust among authors, reviewers, editors, and readers.
AI supports us in streamlining and strengthening the publication process - analyzing manuscripts, verifying citations and references, detecting plagiarism, and optimizing production workflows. Each AI-assisted operation is subject to mandatory human validation before any data is stored or published, maintaining the highest standards of editorial integrity.
Extrica operates all AI-assisted workflows within secure, access-controlled environments. Data exchanged between systems is encrypted in transit and at rest and processed exclusively within infrastructures that comply with recognized information security and data protection standards. These safeguards ensure that sensitive scholarly content remains protected at every stage of the publishing lifecycle.
Our guiding principles
Human-Centered Oversight. Every AI process in our ecosystem is subject to human judgment. Editors, reviewers, authors and production specialists remain responsible for validating AI-generated results and maintaining editorial integrity.
Transparency and Explainability. Authors and editors deserve to know when and how AI is used. We clearly communicate what each AI system does, what data it processes, and how human oversight ensures accuracy.
Privacy and Data Stewardship. We protect personal and confidential data through strict privacy safeguards. AI tools used by Extrica operate under data protection agreements.
Accountability and Continuous Updates. We monitor our AI systems and update our practices in line with evolving ethical, legal, and technological standards.
AI in the Publication Process
Below we outline how Extrica currently uses AI tools throughout the publishing workflow.
Article submission and metadata extraction
Upon submission, Extrica uses AI-powered document processing tools (such as Clear Skies and Azure AI Document Intelligence) to parse manuscripts. These tools automatically extract key details like the title, authors' names and affiliations, emails, abstract, keywords, and reference list from the uploaded PDF or Word files.
All automatically extracted metadata is subject to human validation: The authors themselves validate the completeness and accuracy of the metadata before the proofing stage — confirming whether any elements are missing from the submitted article, such as author emails, ethical statements, or funding information etc.
Research Integrity checks
To safeguard research integrity, Extrica deploys plagiarism detection software on all submissions. We use industry-standard tools like Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate) to compare incoming manuscripts against a vast database of published literature. This AI-based system flags any substantial overlap or uncited text similarity, helping us catch potential plagiarism or duplicate submissions early.
Scope match and relevance screening
Extrica has developed an internal AI module for article relevancy scoring. This tool evaluates how well a submitted manuscript's content aligns with the aims and scope of the target journal. Using natural language processing, it examines elements like the title, abstract, keywords, and even full text sections to gauge subject matter fit. The AI generates a relevancy score or flag for each submission, helping to identify out-of-scope manuscripts early.
This is a decision-support tool to assist Editors-in-Chief and editorial board members in the desk review stage.
Crucially, a human editor always reviews the AI's suggestion: if the tool flags a submission as likely out-of-scope, an Assistant Editor or Editor-in-Chief will manually verify the content against the journal's scope before making any rejection or transfer decision. This ensures that borderline cases get a fair human assessment.
Post-acceptance production
We use Azure OpenAI services to assist in copyediting, formatting, and proofreading. It is used to automatically identify and tag entities (like author names, institutions, references) and process text to match our publication style, check for consistency in terminology, to parse and format equations, tables, and figure captions, adapting the manuscript to the layout requirements of our journals etc. All such AI usage is closely overseen by our production team.
Data Protection
Throughout all these AI applications in our workflow, Extrica is committed to protecting personal data and confidential content. We choose AI tools and platforms that ensure adequate personal data protection measures.
Extrica enters into necessary data protection agreements with third-party AI tools providers ensuring that Extrica retains control over the data and that it is used solely to provide the intended service to us, not to train broad AI models. For more information on how we process personal data please see our Privacy Policy.
