About the Journal
Druze Studies Journal (DSJ) is an open-access interdisciplinary journal that aims to advance scholarly understanding of the Druze communities, including their history, society, and faith.
Aims and Scope
DSJ provides a platform for exchanging knowledge, scholarship, and ideas among scholars who produce scholarship focusing on the Druze. The journal aims to increase scholarly publications on the Druze, specifically comparative projects between communities in various countries, including diasporic communities. The journal will publish discipline-specific research projects and will encourage interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on the Druze in a way that analyzes and synthesizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole to explain the Druze’s history, present, and future.
Submissions must focus on the Druze as a whole, or on specific Druze communities, or include a comparison between the Druze and others or a comparison between several communities. We encourage submissions from discipline-specific or those who employ an interdisciplinary approach, including, for example, History, Religious Studies, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Literature, Economics, Medicine and Health, Psychology, Philosophy, Geography, Art (Performing and Visual), Law, and Education, Journalism, Media Studies and Communication.
Open Access
Druze Studies Journal is an Open Access journal which means that all content is freely available immediately upon publication without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0) International License, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
The journal does not charge authors any fees to publish in the journal.
Copyright
Authors retain copyright in their work. All articles in Druze Studies Journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0) International License.
Peer review
The journal adheres to rigorous academic standards. Articles will first be internally reviewed, for relevance to Druze Studies, by two members out of three: the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, and/or one editorial board member. Only relevant manuscripts will be sent for external double-blind review by scholars of international repute.
Three reviewers will review the systematic literature reviews internally: the Editor-in-Chief, the Associate Editor, and one editorial board member.
The peer review will evaluate all submissions' scholarly merit, originality, methodology, theoretical contributions, and relevance to Druze Studies.
Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC)*
Definitions
‘AI’ and ‘automation’ are not interchangeable - automation refers to rules based software, and includes tools like spelling and grammar checkers, whereas Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) refers to unique content created by tools using predictions made via machine learning from LLMs (large language models) or SMLs (small language models.)
This policy covers the use of AIGC whether by authors, editors, or peer reviewers. Use of automation is not included in this policy and is permitted by Druze Studies Journal.
Authorship
Druze Studies Journal is in agreement with the following statement from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):
AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.
Please review COPE’s Full statement on AI authorship.
Therefore manuscripts should not list AI tools as coauthors when submitting to Druze Studies Journal.
Druze Studies Journal Policy on the use of AIGC and AI Tools
Below is outlined Druze Studies Journal’s policy on the use of AIGC and AI tools for authors, editors and peer reviewers.
Appreciating that the field of artificial intelligence is changing very rapidly and that tools are evolving at an exponential rate, the Druze Studies Journal will review developments and COPE guidelines for AI use and update this policy to reflect the most current best practice. Updates will be reflected via a time-stamp on the webpage. It is expected that content will be reviewed every 6 months by the editorial board, or more frequently if required.
Authors
If authors submitting to Druze Studies Journal have used AIGC in any portion of a manuscript, including text, data, images, graphics, videos, citations or translations, the tool and its use must be described in detail in the Methods and/or Acknowledgements sections of the manuscript, including prompts used if appropriate, and the full text of the original AIGC be attached as supplemental material. AIGC tools include, but are not limited to, GPT-4, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Bard, DALL-E2, Midjourney, and other tools trained on Large Language Models (LLMs) or SMLs (small language models) that generate unique content based on predictions. This also applies to AIGC add-ons within software offered by Microsoft, Adobe and others, as well as online applications offered by Google, Zoom, Canva, Atlas.ti and others.
In the submission process authors will be asked to complete the following statement declaring any AIGC in the manuscript:
During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the factual accuracy and originality of the material.
Standard grammatical aid tools such as rules based softwares that automate, for example, general spelling and grammar are not considered AIGC and are not required to be listed.
If authors discover sources through the use of AI tools, they must access those sources directly in order to use and cite them in their manuscripts.
In accordance with the above COPE statement:
- AIGC tools cannot be listed as authors.
- As with standard manuscript submission, the author is responsible for the accuracy of all information provided by the tool.
Editors
Selection of peer reviewers by Druze Studies Journal editors will not be done by AI tools and manuscripts submitted to Druze Studies Journal will not be uploaded into such tools. Authors submitting to Druze Studies Journal assume that their manuscript will be treated with confidentiality throughout the editorial and peer review process. As it is currently unclear how data ingested in AI tools is stored and reused, sharing any part of the manuscript including text, figures, graphs, and images violates the confidentiality authors expect when submitting manuscripts to Druze Studies Journal. As such, editors agree not to ingest the manuscript into artificial intelligence tools to evaluate the material or find potential peer reviewers.
Editors may search AI supported discovery tools with keywords of their own design to assist in finding expert researchers in a particular field, much as they would consult resources such as Google Scholar or Scopus to find names of prominent authors in a given area of expertise.
Peer Review
Just as authors are accountable for the quality and integrity of their scholarly work, Druze Studies Journal holds peer reviewers to the same standard. At this point in time, Druze Studies Journal does not allow the use of AI tools in the peer review of manuscripts. Among the reasons are:
- AIGC tools are trained on past data whereas the peer review process is concerned with the evaluation of new research and the novel application of methodologies which can only be properly assessed by expert researchers in the field.
- AIGC tools at this point in time can replicate and amplify human bias rather than correct it in the peer review process.
- AIGC tools are often created and owned by private commercial interests and their processes are not transparent or interpretable.
Uploading manuscripts into AIGC tools potentially compromises authors' proprietary rights and confidentiality.
Peer reviewers will be required to acknowledge Druze Studies Journal’s policy on the use of AI in peer review when accepting manuscripts for review.
* This policy is based upon the AIGC policy from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.
