AI Policy Tracker for Journals in RCWS and TPC

About this tracker

The project

This tracker is part of a broader project where we are analyzing how our academic journals in our field are responding to generative AI. We will be sharing our analysis in the coming months.

What's included, and what's missing

Our tracker lists only those journals for which we could find a generative AI policy. If you know of a journal with a policy we have missed, or you see a broken or incorrect link, please use our reporting form (opens in new tab). For anything else, you can email Anuj Gupta at anujguptaresearch7 [at] gmail [dot] com.

How the data was collected

Origins of the project Chris Anson presented early findings on emerging GenAI policies in some of the journals in our field at the Eleventh International Writing Analytics Conference (2025). Anuj Gupta and Susan Miller-Cochran took inspiration from his work and started building a more comprehensive database of journals and corresponding policies. In 2026, we joined forces and started a collaborative project to map emerging trends in these policies.

Building the journal list.We started with the list of journals in RCWS and TPC published by Doug Hesse (2019), and then added to it based on our knowledge of journals in the field. No list of journals in a field can probably ever be exhaustive, since what counts as a field and what counts as a journal within it are subjective to a degree. This is why we welcome your suggestions for other journals that we can add to our list.

First round (January 2026). We checked each journal's website for a generative AI policy, using search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo to locate journal, publisher, and organisational policies. We used Google Sheets and Google Docs to document their findings and Zoom for regular meetings to discuss their work.

Update (October 2026). We used the web search and browsing tools of Claude Opus 5.5 to check whether any journals that didn’t have a policy in January 2026 had recently published one. We instructed Claude to respect each website's robots.txt rules and any other restrictions on automated access and to keep its requests to a minimum so as not to burden any website's servers. We manually verified every result Claude found by checking the policies ourselves.

The website was designed by Anuj Gupta with assistance from Claude.

References

Hesse, D. (2019). Journals in composition studies, thirty-five years after. College English, 81(4), 367–396.

Using this data

The tracker is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and we request that you include a citation to our tracker in any such work. This license covers our compilation of this database only. For the policies themselves and how you might use them in your work, please follow the guidelines set by the individual journals, their editors, and their publishers.

How to cite

The DOI above always points to the latest version. Each version also has its own DOI, listed on Zenodo, for citing the exact version you used.