Policies

All articles published in JYI are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Under this license, anyone is free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any purpose, including commercially, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided, and any changes made are indicated.

Each article displays its license terms on the article page and, where applicable, in machine-readable metadata.

Authors retain copyright of their work. By submitting to JYI, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article and identify it as having been first published in The Journal of Young Innovators, while retaining all other rights to their work.

Authors are free to deposit their published work in institutional repositories, share it on personal or scholarly websites, and reuse it in subsequent works, provided proper citation is given.

JYI imposes no embargo on author self-archiving. Authors may deposit and distribute the submitted manuscript (preprint), the accepted manuscript (postprint), and the published version (Version of Record) in any of the following venues, immediately upon publication and without seeking further permission:

• The author's personal or institutional website
• An institutional or subject repository (e.g., arXiv, SSRN)
• A scholarly social network (e.g., ResearchGate, Academia.edu)
• A funder-mandated repository

The published version remains licensed under CC BY 4.0 wherever it is shared. Authors are asked to include the original citation and a link to the article on young-innovator.org.

Every research article published in JYI undergoes double-blind peer review by at least two independent reviewers. Author identities and affiliations are concealed from reviewers, and reviewer identities are concealed from authors. Opinion pieces and interview features are not sent for double-blind review. They are read and approved by at least two members of the editorial board before publication.

Peer review and all editorial decisions are the responsibility of the Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Board, whose names and affiliations are listed on the Editorial Team page.

Peer editors. The journal’s peer editors are student editorial assistants. Under the supervision of the Editorial Board they read submissions and draft developmental comments on writing and structure, which authors receive alongside the reviewer reports. Peer editors do not act as peer reviewers, and their comments do not count toward the two required reviews. They take no part in editorial decisions.

Editors as authors. A member of the editorial team who submits to JYI is excluded from every stage of the handling of that manuscript, as set out under Conflicts of Interest. Authors who wish to contest a decision may follow the procedure under Complaints and Appeals.

JYI publishes one volume per year. Volume 1 (2024–2025) was published as a single issue. From Volume 2 (2026) onward, each volume is published in two issues. Articles are released online continuously as soon as they have completed peer review, copyediting, and final author approval, and each article is assigned to the issue that is open at the time of publication.

Publication history. The list below is generated from the journal’s article records.

• Volume 1, Issue 1: October 2024 to April 2025, 7 articles, 4 of them research articles
• Volume 2, Issue 1: January 2026, 4 articles
• Volume 2, Issue 2: April to August 2026, 6 articles

For the 2025–2026 academic year, submission and publication in JYI are free of charge. There are no submission fees, article processing charges (APCs), or publication fees, thanks to the generous support of the Brain-Targeted Teaching Institute, and grant funding dedicated to making scholarly publishing accessible to students of all income levels. Need-based waivers are also available by request to editor@young-innovator.org.

Beginning with the 2026–2027 academic year, JYI will introduce a $65 USD publication fee per article, payable only after the article has been accepted for publication. There is no fee to submit an article for review.

JYI takes plagiarism seriously. Beginning June 2026, all submissions will be screened for originality using Crossref Similarity Check (powered by iThenticate) prior to peer review. Until that date, submissions are screened through editorial review and cross-referencing against published literature and online sources. Manuscripts flagged with substantial overlap are returned to the author or rejected outright, depending on the nature of the match.

Plagiarism, including verbatim copying, substantial paraphrasing without attribution, self-plagiarism, and improperly attributed quotations, is grounds for immediate rejection. If plagiarism is detected after publication, the journal will issue a correction or retract the article in accordance with COPE guidelines and notify the author's affiliated institution where appropriate.

JYI follows the principles articulated by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices.

Concerns about misconduct, including data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or undisclosed conflicts of interest, may be sent to editor@young-innovator.org.

The Journal of Young Innovators welcomes thoughtful use of AI tools. We also require honesty about it.

What must be declared

If you used a large language model or any other generative AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and similar) at any stage of your research or writing, you must document that use in your manuscript. Include an “AI Use Statement” as a short section at the end of your paper, before the reference list. If AI shaped your methods, for example by coding data or generating analysis, describe it in the Methods section instead.

Your statement should name the tool, the version if you know it, and what you actually used it for. One or two sentences is enough. For example:

“ChatGPT (GPT-4) was used to brainstorm interview questions during the design stage. All questions were revised by the author before use.”

What does not need to be declared

Basic copyediting. If a tool only checked your spelling, grammar, or punctuation, no statement is needed.

What is not permitted

AI tools cannot be listed as an author or co-author. Authors remain fully responsible for every claim in the manuscript. Text generated by AI and submitted as your own writing, fabricated data, and citations that do not correspond to real sources are grounds for rejection.

Please verify that every reference in your paper exists and says what you claim it says. Generative tools invent plausible-looking citations, and this is one of the most common problems we see.

Failing to declare AI use, or misrepresenting the extent of it, is also grounds for rejection.

Screening and consequences

All submissions are screened using our institutionally approved AI detection systems. Any manuscript returning a result above 20% AI-generated content will be rejected automatically, and no further submissions from that author will be considered.

Check your own draft before you submit

Because this threshold applies to every submission, we strongly encourage you to run your draft through a detection tool yourself before sending it to us:

• Grammarly (grammarly.com) includes an AI detection feature alongside its writing checks
• Copyleaks AI Detector (copyleaks.com/ai-detector)

Further reading

We encourage you to read the guidance published by these organizations:

• Springer
• Elsevier
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
• Yale Poorvu Center
• UC Berkeley

Reviewers and editors

Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, in whole or in part, to generative AI tools, as doing so violates the confidentiality of the peer review process. Editors may use AI-assisted tools for administrative tasks (e.g., similarity screening) but final editorial decisions are made by human editors.

All authors, reviewers, and editors must declare any financial, personal, professional, or institutional relationships that could reasonably be perceived as influencing their work in connection with a submission.

Authors must include a Conflicts of Interest statement at the end of the manuscript. If there are no conflicts to declare, the statement should read “The authors declare no conflicts of interest.” Funding sources, grants, employment, consulting relationships, stock ownership, patents, and personal relationships with editors or reviewers must be disclosed.

Reviewers must decline review if they have a conflict with the authors, the work, or any party that funded or is affected by the work.

Editors must recuse themselves from handling any manuscript with which they have a personal, professional, or competitive conflict, and must not handle manuscripts authored by close colleagues, recent collaborators, students, or family members. In such cases the manuscript is reassigned to another editor.

JYI encourages authors to make the data, code, and materials underlying their findings openly available to the extent permitted by ethical, legal, and privacy constraints. Authors are asked to deposit datasets in a public, recognized repository (e.g., Zenodo, OSF, Dryad, GitHub for code) and to cite the dataset in the manuscript with a persistent identifier where possible.

Each accepted manuscript should include a brief Data Availability Statement describing where the data can be accessed, any restrictions that apply, and how to request access where data cannot be made fully public (e.g., human-subjects data subject to IRB restrictions).

Authors, reviewers, readers, and other parties may raise concerns or appeals about the editorial process or any published content. JYI follows COPE's guidance on appeals and complaints.

Retaliation against complainants in good faith is prohibited.

JYI follows COPE's retraction and correction guidelines.

All correction, expression-of-concern, and retraction notices are open access, freely linked from the original article, and indexed alongside the original record.

JYI maintains a permanent, freely-accessible online archive of all published articles at young-innovator.org/issues. Each article is hosted as a downloadable PDF with a stable URL based on its title slug.

In the event the journal ceases publication, the editorial team will ensure that the existing article archive remains accessible through web archives and, where possible, through transfer to a partner institution or repository.

The Journal of Young Innovators is an independent, non-profit open-access journal published from Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The journal is operated by its editorial team for the purpose of youth educational advancement and is not owned by, sponsored by, or operated for the financial benefit of any commercial entity.

Editorial decisions are made independently of any sponsor, funder, or institutional affiliation of the editors. The editorial team is solely responsible for the content of the journal, the selection of reviewers, and the acceptance or rejection of manuscripts.

JYI does not accept paid advertising on the journal website or within published articles. The journal does not engage in direct marketing of acceptance, expedited review, or publication services to authors. Solicitations purporting to offer guaranteed acceptance, paid placement, or fee-based indexing should not be regarded as genuine communications from JYI and may be reported to editor@young-innovator.org.

JYI collects only the personal information necessary to operate the journal: author and reviewer names, affiliations, and contact details for the purpose of editorial correspondence and attribution.

We do not sell or share personal information with third parties. Information collected during submission is used solely for editorial workflow, peer review, and publication. Aggregated, anonymized site analytics may be collected to improve the service.

Questions about personal data may be sent to editor@young-innovator.org.