Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), through the use of large language models (LLMs), is making a lot of changes to both book publishing in general and science journal publishing in particular. The more you as an editor know about the issues involved, the more helpful you can be to your author clients and your publisher clients.

Mainstream Book Publishing

Major traditional publishing houses are no longer the only agents producing hardcovers and paperbacks; there are loads of indie publishers. Also, there are now other options: e-books, whether produced by traditional publishers or by indie publishers, and self-publishing, which allows for global distribution, unlike in traditional publishing (“The Publishing Industry Is Changing”). And publishing sometimes now involves the use of GenAI.

These publishers usually will not publish books written by GenAI, though they will accept a manuscript for which the human author used GenAI for help in brainstorming and outlining. Some even accept manuscripts for which GenAI is used to edit the author’s writing (“The Future of Publishing: AI, Hybrid Publishing, and Author Power”). But the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress specifies that “copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term ‘author,’ which is used in both the US Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans” (“Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence”). Traditional publishers do, however, generally want authors to disclose whether they have used GenAI to draft or rewrite their work (“AI and Publishing: FAQ for Writers”). You can send your authors to the “AI Best Practices for Authors” guide put together by the Authors Guild.

Science Journal Publishing

There is enormous competition for grants that fund scientific research, because there are so many researchers facing their profession’s publish-or-perish mandate. Fairly recently, though, at least in the United States, there have been deep cuts to research funding. Federal science agencies are dealing with budget cuts and staff reductions. All of that means decreases in the number of scientists writing research papers and in the number of human editors editing the papers (“Federal Science Agencies Facing a ‘Generational Loss,’ Nonprofit Says”).

Yet more and more authors are using GenAI to write articles faster (“Using Artificial Intelligence for Scholarly Writing”). This has put a strain on human peer reviewers by increasing their workload, because science and academia consider pre-publication peer reviewing to be an unpaid duty that scientists must do to be considered true professionals (“The Strain on Scientific Publishing”). Some authors who are not native speakers of English also now use GenAI now to translate their writing into English (“Artificial Intelligence Tools and Literary Translation: A Comparative Investigation of ChatGPT and Google Translate From Novice and Advanced EFL Student Translators’ Perspectives”). And some authors use GenAI to compile their papers’ reference lists. When GenAI does the bulk of the writing, papers may contain unsubstantiated data and analyses. When GenAI compiles reference lists, it often creates entries about nonexistent publications and gets publication details wrong or omits some (“USC/ASC Graduate Writing Coach”).

The resulting increased workload for journals has created a push to use GenAI in publishing. Some publishers believe they can lower their expenses by using GenAI rather than contracting with human editors to edit manuscripts. Ironically, the use of GenAI has created the need for more humans to double-check manuscripts, images, and reference lists for coherence, validity, and originality (“AI in Scientific Publishing: Slower, Worse, and More Expensive”).

In addition, the use of GenAI has exponentially increased the growth of predatory publishing and paper mills (“Identity Theft in Academia: Predatory Journals, AI, and the Rise of False Authorship”; “Journal Evaluation & Predatory Publishing”). The first group involves deceptive journals and publishers who make money by rapidly publishing fake science articles created by GenAI, by putting different authors’ names on science articles already published elsewhere and then publishing the resulting material in their own journals, or by charging authors publication fees but not doing peer review or not providing editorial oversight (“Shining the Spotlight: The Dark Side of Publishing Gets Even Darker”). The second group makes up research or alters research data, creates fake papers from them, and then sells authorships to scientists who didn’t do the research or the writing. If you suspect an author is unknowingly involved with one or both of these groups, send them to the “Journal Integrity Desk” section of Beall’s Lists, to Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers, and to the NOAA Library to learn more.

All Publishing Arenas

We editors must stay informed about AI’s impacts on copyright, factual integrity, and what constitutes authorship. And we must make sure our clients know that we have the skills to obviate the “need” for AI to (1) try to fix story plots, character development, and dialogue; (2) try to fix images and tables; (3) try to create reference-list entries that are valid; (4) try to obtain permissions for quoting passages and quoting lyrics; or (5) try to produce accurate translations. Good resources in addition to the ones provided earlier in this post include the following:

• AI Sidequest, a newsletter from writer and editor Mignon Fogarty
• The blog posts and newsletters of publishing and AI expert George Walkley
• The articles in general, the newsletters, and all of the articles about AI from publishing-industry expert Jane Friedman
• The blog posts and archived newsletters of writer and editor Josh Bernoff
• The “Industry News” section of the magazine Publishers Weekly
• The blog of Lumina Datamatics
• Futurism’s archive of articles about computing
• Posts about AI on the blog Retraction Watch
• The website of The Authors Guild
• The “Publications and Research” section of the Publishers Association website