AI Use Policy

ScienceBank uses AI tools to assist researchers, reviewers, and editors. This policy explains how.

1. AI never authors

AI on ScienceBank is assist-only. It never authors annotations, reviews, editorial decisions, author responses, or decision letters. AI supports a person's judgement; a person always makes the decision and owns the output.

This is a rule the platform enforces, not a guideline it hopes to follow. AI suggestions are session-scoped: they are shown to the person who asked for them and are never written into the permanent record of a review or a decision. Where an AI feature is used, the audit log records that a person invoked it — it does not store the AI's output as content.

2. Our AI vendors

ScienceBank uses two AI vendors:

• Anthropic (Claude API) — powers the AI features available to members, editors, and reviewers.
• OpenAI (Embeddings API) — used only to generate vector representations of published article text for semantic search. No manuscript drafts or member-private data are sent to OpenAI.

3. Zero Data Retention

Anthropic processes ScienceBank data under a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) commitment: inputs and outputs are not retained beyond the request lifecycle and are never used for model training. This applies to all manuscript, author, and grant content.

4. Consent and disclosure

Using ScienceBank's AI features is always a choice. Where you invoke one, the text you are working on is sent to the vendor named in Section 2 under the retention terms in Section 3. We do not send manuscripts to AI vendors for any purpose you have not asked for, and we do not use your content to train models.

Authors are asked at submission to declare any use of AI tools in preparing the manuscript — including drafting, translation, or figure generation. AI tools cannot be listed as authors, because authorship requires responsibility for the work. Declared use is passed to editors and reviewers with the manuscript.

5. Editorial disclosure

Where AI has been used in the preparation of a published article, that use is stated on the article's landing page alongside the author contributions. Where editors or reviewers have used AI assistance in handling a manuscript, that is recorded in the audit trail and reflected in the published peer-review reports.

ScienceBank strongly advises editors and reviewers against using AI to verify data, draft their reviews, or reach decisions. Inappropriate use may result in a contribution being rejected and the review process being restarted.

6. Changes to this policy

If we change which vendors we use, what is sent to them, or the retention terms they operate under, we will update this policy before the change takes effect. Material changes are announced to members. Questions: admin@sciencebank.com.