Author Submission and Licence Agreement

Document ID: LEG-04 · Version: 1.0 · Effective Date: 8 August 2026 Accepted at: the submission step, per Submission

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1. Scope

1.1 This Agreement applies each time you submit a manuscript to a Venue through AutoConference. It supplements the Terms of Service (LEG-02), the Privacy Policy (LEG-03), and the Consent to Research Use of Platform Data (LEG-01).

1.2 "Submission" means the manuscript, abstract, figures, supplementary materials, code, data, and all subsequent revisions, rebuttals, and author responses.

1.3 The submitting author acts for all co-authors and must have their authority. Confirm this before you click submit; getting it wrong creates real liability for you personally under §7.

2. You keep your copyright

2.1 Copyright in your Submission stays with you and your co-authors, or with whoever owns it under your employment or funding arrangements. Nothing here transfers ownership.

2.2 You keep the right to post your Submission on preprint servers and institutional repositories, to present it, to reuse it in a thesis, to publish an extended version elsewhere, and to make any other use, subject only to the Venue's own policy on concurrent submission and prior publication.

3. Licence to the Platform

3.1 You grant AutoConference.ai a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable licence to:

• (a) host, store, back up, and transmit the Submission;
• (b) reproduce, display, and distribute it at the visibility level configured by the Venue;
• (c) process it through automated review systems, including transmission to contracted third-party AI providers under the terms in LEG-03 §5.2;
• (d) create technical derivative works necessary to operate the Service — indexes, embeddings, summaries, structured extractions, format conversions, and accessibility versions;
• (e) retain and use it for the research purposes described in LEG-01, at the identifiability tier permitted there; and
• (f) preserve it as part of the scholarly record, including transfer to a preservation service if we cease operation.

3.2 The licence in §3.1 is limited to those purposes. It does not permit us to sell your Submission or to license it to others for commercial exploitation. We may use it to train models only where you have separately consented under LEG-01 A.2, or where you submitted to an Open Research Venue on the terms of LEG-01 §§5.4–5.8 (see §5.4 below).

3.3 "Irrevocable" applies to the specific purposes in §3.1 and exists so the scholarly record and citation graph stay stable. It does not override your rights under data protection law, which are described in LEG-03 §9.

4. Public licence options

4.1 Where the Venue publishes accepted or reviewed Submissions, you choose the public licence at submission time from the options the Venue offers. Typical options:

Option	Effect
CC BY 4.0	Anyone may reuse and adapt with attribution. Required by many funders (e.g. Plan S).
CC BY-SA 4.0	As above, derivatives must carry the same licence.
CC BY-NC 4.0	Non-commercial reuse only. Note this is not compliant with some open-access funder mandates.
CC0 1.0	Dedicated to the public domain.
Display-only	We display it under the §3.1 licence; no public reuse licence granted.

4.1a Whichever option you choose, bibliographic metadata of a published Submission — title, author list, abstract, keywords, dates, decision status, DOI — is always dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 (LEG-02 §5.5), so that indexers and bibliographic services can operate. Your licence choice governs the full text and materials, not the metadata. Metadata of Submissions that are never published is not affected.

4.1b At an Open Research Venue the menu is narrower: only options compatible with the corpus licence CC BY 4.0 are offered, and Display-only is not among them, because the corpus is by definition an open publication. The options actually available are rendered on the submission page for that venue.

4.2 Creative Commons licences are irrevocable once granted. Choose deliberately. If you are unsure, check your funder's and institution's requirements first — and note that if your work was produced under a Plan S or similar mandate, an NC licence may put you out of compliance.

4.3 If your work is a US Government work, a Crown copyright work, or otherwise subject to a mandatory licence, tell us at submission so we apply the correct notice.

5. Public visibility and open review

5.1 The Venue's visibility configuration is displayed on the submission page before you submit, and covers: whether the Submission is public during review, whether reviews are public, whether reviewer identities are revealed, whether rejected Submissions remain visible, and whether discussion is public.

5.2 Read it before you submit. Once your Submission is public under that configuration, third parties may have copied and indexed it, and withdrawal cannot undo that. We will not retroactively make previously private content public.

5.3 Withdrawal. You may withdraw a Submission before a decision is issued, and the Venue's policy governs what happens to the record. Where the Venue keeps a public record of withdrawn Submissions, that is disclosed before submission.

5.4 Open Research Venues. If the Venue is an Open Research Venue, the whole review record — your manuscript including if it is rejected, every review and score, the discussion, the decision and its rationale, and the model interaction traces — is published as an open, attributable research corpus and used to train and evaluate automated review models. You agree to this on a dedicated screen before your first submission there (LEG-01 §§5.4–5.8). Once the corpus is released it cannot be recalled, and models trained on it cannot be untrained. Separately from ordinary withdrawal under §5.3, LEG-01 §5.8 guarantees you at least 30 days after the decision to ask that your Submission be left out of the corpus, and the Venue must honour that request. Standard Venues on AutoConference do not publish an attributable corpus and do not train models on your content unless you opt in under LEG-01 A.2; they are listed at https://autoconference.ai/venues. An Open Research Venue may also restrict the licence menu in §4.1 to options compatible with CC BY 4.0; the available options are shown on the submission page.

6. Automated review — what you are agreeing to

6.1 Your Submission will be processed by AI systems that generate review text, scores, and recommendations. Read LEG-01 Part C for the full notice, including your right to human review and appeal.

6.2 Confidentiality of unpublished work. We treat Submissions as confidential during review, and permanently so at Standard Venues unless and until the Venue publishes them. At an Open Research Venue the manuscript enters the public corpus under §5.4, including if it is rejected. In every case, third-party AI providers process Submissions under contracts prohibiting them from training on your content and requiring zero or minimum retention, and we do not use consumer-tier AI services for Submissions.

6.3 No manipulation. You must not embed hidden text, prompt injections, invisible instructions, adversarial perturbations, or any other mechanism intended to influence an automated reviewer. Doing so is research misconduct under LEG-02 §7.1(c) and will result in desk rejection and notification of your institution and co-authors.

6.4 Your own LLM use. Disclose any use of LLMs in preparing the Submission, in the form the Venue requires. You remain fully responsible for everything in the Submission, including anything an LLM produced — including fabricated citations, which are your responsibility and not the tool's.

6.5 An LLM cannot be an author. Authorship requires accountability, and a model cannot be accountable.

7. Your representations and warranties

7.1 You represent and warrant that:

• (a) the Submission is original to the named authors, or that all third-party material is used with permission and properly attributed;
• (b) it does not infringe any copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, database right, privacy right, or right of publicity;
• (c) it does not contain defamatory, unlawful, or export-controlled content;
• (d) all named authors made a genuine contribution and have agreed to the submission and to this Agreement, and no person entitled to authorship has been omitted;
• (e) you have obtained all required approvals — ethics board or IRB approval, informed consent from human subjects, animal research approvals, data use agreements, and any employer, funder, or government clearances;
• (f) any personal data in the Submission is included lawfully and, where required, with the data subject's consent;
• (g) you have disclosed all funding sources and competing interests;
• (h) the Submission complies with the Venue's policy on concurrent submission and prior publication; and
• (i) you have the right to grant the licences in §3 and §4.

7.2 If any of these stops being true, tell us at integrity@autoconference.ai immediately.

8. Research integrity

8.1 Submissions may be screened for text similarity, image manipulation, duplicate submission, undisclosed LLM generation, citation manipulation, and prompt injection.

8.2 Screening results are signals, not verdicts. Where a concern arises, you will be told what it is and given a reasonable opportunity to respond before any finding is made.

8.3 Where misconduct is established, we may desk-reject, retract, publish a notice, notify your institution, co-authors, funders, and other publishers, and restrict your account. Appeals go to https://autoconference.ai/legal and are decided by someone not involved in the original finding.

8.4 We follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance on corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions.

9. Persistence of the record

9.1 Published Submissions, reviews, and decisions form part of the scholarly record. Corrections and retractions are published as linked notices rather than by silently altering or deleting the original, so that the record stays honest.

9.2 DOIs, where assigned, are permanent and resolve to a landing page even after retraction.

10. General

10.1 This Agreement is governed by the laws of Delaware, USA, subject to LEG-02 §17.4 for consumers in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland.

10.2 If a provision is unenforceable it is severed and the rest stands.

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Submission-page acceptance copy

By submitting, I confirm on behalf of all authors that:

☐  I have read and accept the Author Submission and Licence Agreement.

☐  All co-authors have approved this submission and authorised me to grant the
    licences it describes.

☐  This submission contains no hidden instructions, prompt injections, or other
    content intended to influence automated review.

☐  I have disclosed all use of large language models in preparing this
    submission, and I take full responsibility for its content.

Public licence for this submission:
( ) CC BY 4.0   ( ) CC BY-SA 4.0   ( ) CC BY-NC 4.0   ( ) CC0   ( ) Display-only
    ↳ Render only options compatible with CC BY 4.0 at an
      Open Research Venue; Display-only is not offered there.

Visibility for this venue:  Accepted and rejected submissions, their reviews, and the decisions become public after the cycle publishes.
Venue type:                 Standard Venue
    ↳ If Open Research Venue, the LEG-01 A.3 gate must already have been
      confirmed by this user for this venue. Block submission otherwise.