The Warranty Axis: How Publishers Govern the Human-Reserved Core of AI-Assisted Authorship
A companion study to a prior analysis of publisher generative-AI policies found that major publishers converge on reserving a set of functions for human authors: verification, evidential judgment, interpretation, final approval, responsibility for correction, and legal and ethical answerability (Yamada, 2026a). That study established what publishers reserve. This article asks a different question: how they guard it. Reading the current policies of Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Sage, and IEEE, it finds that the reserved core, at the level of text, is governed almost entirely as a regime of disclosure and human accountability rather than as a list of forbidden tasks. Genuine text-level prohibition, under which a task may not be performed with AI even when the use is disclosed, appears at only one of the six publishers; two others bar the substitution of the author rather than the assistance of AI. Five of the six publishers explicitly prohibit AI-generated or AI-altered primary research images; IEEE instead governs them through disclosure, while ordinary research-integrity rules continue to prohibit the falsification of primary data. The article names the dimension along which the core is defined the warranty axis: what a publisher reserves is the obligation that a competent human warrant the resulting claims, rather than a set of tasks that machines may not touch. The warranty axis is the predominant dimension along which the text-level reserved core is governed; disclosure and prohibition are its two principal encodings, though some task-specific prohibitions rest on additional grounds. The reading clarifies rather than weakens the earlier finding, since a coredefined as warranty does not collapse when disclosed assistance is permitted. The article also notes that the principal boundary around primary research images tracks falsification rather than AI use and is itself in motion, and that permission stated at the publisher level need not coincide with the standards individual journals, editors, and reviewers apply.