Digital innovations and research integrity – opportunities and risks for scholarly publishing
The January 2024 special issue will offer a platform to discuss the many and varied ways digital innovations are impacting both research outputs and scholarly publishing workflow practices, the benefits and challenges these bring, and implications and recommendations for the best practice of the future. The journal welcomes case studies, industry updates, original research, or opinion pieces; please see our Author Guidelines for more information.
Call for papers
The scholarly publishing industry has been evolving for hundreds of years, but arguably the most significant change has come in the past few decades with the digitization of the scholarly record. This has unlocked opportunities to transform the way research is published and how publishing workflows operate, but also presents many challenges. For example, artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools are being adopted in a variety of ways across publishing to automate processes, and new tools are being explored and developed to further assist and streamline workflows. But with the emergence of large language models such as ChatGPT at the end of 2022, it has also become clear that there is opportunity for misuse, particularly with AI-generated research papers. How might these tools be used and misused in the future, and whose responsibility is it to ensure research integrity is maintained and ethical practices are enforced?
UKRI describe research integrity as follows: “Research carried out with a high level of integrity upholds values of honesty, rigor, transparency and open communication, as well as care and respect for those involved in research and accountability for a positive research environment”. Never has this been more important in scholarly publishing. Ultimately, research integrity underpins trust in the scholarly record and allows future researchers to build on previous work.
This special issue of Learned Publishing will offer a platform to discuss the many and varied ways digital innovations are impacting both research outputs and scholarly publishing workflow practices, the benefits and challenges these bring, and implications and recommendations for the best practice of the future. The journal welcomes case studies, industry updates, original research, or opinion pieces; please see our Author Guidelines for more information.
Topics relevant to this theme include, but are not limited to:
- Alternate research outputs (such as datasets, data visualizations, GIS projects, digital humanities projects, and other multi-modal digital outputs)
- Case studies on the use (and misuse) of digital innovations in scholarly publishing
- Digital innovations impacting publishing workflows (e.g., automation, manuscript screening tools, image manipulation detection, peer review, production
- Guidelines and best practice recommendations
- Prevention and detection of research misconduct
- Protection of the publication record
- Role and ethics of AI and machine learning in scholarly publishing
- Role of publishers to support best practice in research integrity
Schedule:
• Submission deadline: 15 September 2023
• Publication date: January 2024
Contact:
If you have any questions about this special issue of Learned Publishing, please contact the Editor, Laura Dormer (editor@alpsp.org) or the North American Editor, Michelle Urberg (us-editor@alpsp.org).
