As with many business leaders, publishers face increasingly more uncertain environments, with constantly evolving policies and best practices, and largely people-driven workflows, leading to higher employee turnover, and burned-out authors, reviewers, and staff.
This excellent Scholarly Kitchen piece looks at the role that artificial intelligence could play in peer review. It offers some very sensible and practical strategies. The suggestions here do not require science-fiction, they are not an imaginable near future, but something we could be doing right now. This is an approach that plays to the strength of humans and of artificial intelligence.
To overcome some of these challenges and address their communities’ evolving needs, in the future, publishers must respond with an equal emphasis on supporting both the people and the machines assisting them. They must strike a balance between using complementary tools to help improve efficiencies and streamline workflows, and to also develop their teams so that they can leverage these tools to their fullest potential.
To better understand how humans and AI can collectively improve peer review, we asked two publishing experts who specialize in human and AI ethical, equitable, and sustainable publishing solutions to share their thoughts on the future of peer review. Chhavi Chauhan is the Director of Scientific Outreach at the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP), and Chirag Jay Patel is the Head of Sales and Business Development, Americas at Cactus Communications. Together, we explored the changing landscape of peer review and focused on practical ways to navigate where we are to get where we want to be in the future.
