Policy statements

1.  Editorial statement on the use of AI assistance in peer review (August 2026).

The purpose of a referee report is to provide an academically justified recommendation for the handling and managing editors who have to make an editorial decision about the submission.  The main part of the referee report is the recommendation,  its justification,  and the argument for it.

One of the tasks of the referee is to explain to the handling and managing editors how they arrived at their recommendation.  If they use any external help in arriving at their recommendation (including the use of assistive AI),  this needs to be fully explained to the handling and managing editor and will form part of the contextual background for making the editorial decision.  Handling and managing editors will decide to ignore referee reports if they determine (taking all contextual information into account) that the recommendation is not sufficiently academically justified.

2.  Editorial statement on submissions with preliminary conference publications (August 2026).

A submission that is an expanded version of a peer-reviewed and published conference paper can be accepted for ZML if the unpublished research content in it is sufficient to meet the standards of papers publishable in ZML. 

For this purpose,  the authors must submit the published conference paper together with their submission.  In the submission,  it must be clearly stated that the paper is an expanded version of the conference paper and the conference paper must be correctly cited for all results that appear in it.

The peer reviewer is asked to make their publication recommendation on the basis of the results that do not appear in the conference paper.  For this purpose,  a result that is stated but not proved in the conference paper counts as unpublished research content,  unless it has been published somewhere else.