The Brave New World of Scholarly Publication
Something new (or old?) to worry about as an editor and reviewer. Imagine someone taking a paper from a good journal written by someone else but in a related context to their own and on a topic that matches their own research interests. Now instruct the AI to rewrite the paper by changing the focus to the one that you are interested in, revising quotes etc. to be about your context and tweaked focus. Revise manually to add some local flavour and references so the bibliography isn't a complete match. Submit to a high ranked journal and profit...
The clumsy ones can be detected, particularly if you pay attention to cross-ref matches in the bibliography (takes a lot more work if they have to change most of those). I wonder how many others are taking the time to do it more invisibly, particularly if they have actual data of their own to include (as opposed to the lazy who just copy that as well). I'm sure some were trying to do this before GenAI, but our new tools do seem to make this so easy for those looking for shortcuts to success.
How much longer can we sustain the current model of publishing research? In asking the question I do recognise that some would like to see it all torn down for its manyfold sins and failures. Respecting the modern environment, rather than simply watch it all burn, I'd like to recycle what we have in a more sustainable way.
One idea is to build on the open culture of venues like arXiv and move to a more peer connected active model of scholarly engagement. But given the sophistication of how social media generally is being weaponised I worry that communities will fail without requiring fairly draconian limits. I wonder how long it will be before scholarly societies will reinvent themselves using these ideas and modern systems as validated and vetted fora with heavy gatekeeping to protect the integrity of the literature. Yes, that risks a return to a system of patronage, privilege and orthodoxy. Still, I think we have a greater chance of managing those issues than we have of controlling the chaos that I think is coming to traditional journal publishing.