The use of AI in the publication process is intended to increase the speed of decision making during the review process and reduce the burden on editors, reviewers, and authors. The adoption of AI raises key ethical issues around accountability, responsibility, and transparency.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are evolving incredibly quickly, and they are having a significant impact on education and research. This guide provides information about using generative AI in ethical, creative, and evaluative ways. It focuses on five key areas:
This guide is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, with the exception of the CLEAR Framework, which was used with permission of Leo S. Lo, and part of the "Evaluating AI Content" page, which was adapted with permission of the University of British Columbia Library.
Territorial Acknowledgement The University of Alberta, its buildings, labs and research stations are primarily located on the territory of the Néhiyaw (Cree), Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, Nakoda (Stoney), Dene, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Anishinaabe (Ojibway/Saulteaux), lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7 and 8 and homeland of the Métis. The University of Alberta respects the sovereignty, lands, histories, languages, knowledge systems and cultures of all First Nations, Métis and Inuit nations.
Authors are accountable for the originality, validity, and integrity of the content of their submissions. In choosing to use Generative AI tools, journal authors are expected to do so responsibly and in accordance with our journal editorial policies on authorship and principles of publishing ethics and book authors in accordance with our book publishing guidelines. This includes reviewing the outputs of any Generative AI tools and confirming content accuracy.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that the content of their submissions meets the required standards of rigorous scientific and scholarly assessment, research and validation, and is created by the author. Note that some journals may not allow use of Generative AI tools beyond language improvement, therefore authors are advised to consult with the editor of the journal prior to submission.
Generative AI tools must not be listed as an author, because such tools are unable to assume responsibility for the submitted content or manage copyright and licensing agreements. Authorship requires taking accountability for content, consenting to publication via a publishing agreement, and giving contractual assurances about the integrity of the work, among other principles. These are uniquely human responsibilities that cannot be undertaken by Generative AI tools.
Authors must clearly acknowledge within the article or book any use of Generative AI tools through a statement which includes: the full name of the tool used (with version number), how it was used, and the reason for use. For article submissions, this statement must be included in the Methods or Acknowledgments section. Book authors must disclose their intent to employ Generative AI tools at the earliest possible stage to their editorial contacts for approval – either at the proposal phase if known, or if necessary, during the manuscript writing phase. If approved, the book author must then include the statement in the preface or introduction of the book. This level of transparency ensures that editors can assess whether Generative AI tools have been used and whether they have been used responsibly. Taylor & Francis will retain its discretion over publication of the work, to ensure that integrity and guidelines have been upheld.
If an author is intending to use an AI tool, they should ensure that the tool is appropriate and robust for their proposed use, and that the terms applicable to such tool provide sufficient safeguards and protections, for example around intellectual property rights, confidentiality and security.
Taylor & Francis currently does not permit the use of Generative AI in the creation and manipulation of images and figures, or original research data for use in our publications. The term “images and figures” includes pictures, charts, data tables, medical imagery, snippets of images, computer code, and formulas. The term “manipulation” includes augmenting, concealing, moving, removing, or introducing a specific feature within an image or figure. For additional information on Taylor & Francis’ image policy for journals, please see Images and figures.
Utilising Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in any part of the research process should always be undertaken with human oversight and transparency. Research ethics guidelines are still being updated regarding current Generative AI technologies. Taylor & Francis will continue to update our editorial guidelines as the technology and research ethics guidelines evolve.
Taylor & Francis strives for the highest standards of editorial integrity and transparency. Editors’ and peer reviewers’ use of manuscripts in Generative AI systems may pose a risk to confidentiality, proprietary rights and data, including personally identifiable information. Therefore, editors and peer reviewers must not upload files, images or information from unpublished manuscripts into Generative AI tools. Failure to comply with this policy may infringe upon the rightsholder’s intellectual property.
Use of manuscripts in Generative AI systems may give rise to risks around confidentiality, infringement of proprietary rights and data, and other risks. Therefore, editors must not upload unpublished manuscripts, including any associated files, images or information into Generative AI tools.
Editors should check with their Taylor & Francis contact prior to using any Generative AI tools, unless they have already been informed that the tool and proposed use of the tool is authorised. Journal Editors should refer to our Editor Resource page for more information on our code of conduct.
Peer reviewers are chosen experts in their fields and should not be using Generative AI for analysis or to summarise submitted articles or portions thereof in the creation of their reviews. As such, peer reviewers must not upload unpublished manuscripts or project proposals, including any associated files, images or information, into Generative AI tools.
These policies have been triggered by the rise of generative AI* and AI-assisted technologies, which are expected to increasingly be used by content creators. These policies aim to provide greater transparency and guidance to authors, reviewers, editors, readers and contributors. Elsevier will monitor this development and will adjust or refine policies when appropriate.
Where authors use generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process, these technologies should only be used to improve readability and language of the work. Applying the technology should be done with human oversight and control and authors should carefully review and edit the result, because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete or biased. The authors are ultimately responsible and accountable for the contents of the work.
Authors should disclose in their manuscript the use of AI and AI-assisted technologies and a statement will appear in the published work. Declaring the use of these technologies supports transparency and trust between authors, readers, reviewers, editors and contributors and facilitates compliance with the terms of use of the relevant tool or technology.
Authors should not list AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Authorship implies responsibilities and tasks that can only be attributed to and performed by humans. Each (co-) author is accountable for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved and authorship requires the ability to approve the final version of the work and agree to its submission. Authors are also responsible for ensuring that the work is original, that the stated authors qualify for authorship, and the work does not infringe third party rights, and should familiarize themselves with our Ethics in Publishing policy before they submit.
AI For WorkWe do not permit the use of Generative AI or AI-assisted tools to create or alter images in submitted manuscripts. This may include enhancing, obscuring, moving, removing, or introducing a specific feature within an image or figure. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if and as long as they do not obscure or eliminate any information present in the original. Image forensics tools or specialized software might be applied to submitted manuscripts to identify suspected image irregularities.
The only exception is if the use of AI or AI-assisted tools is part of the research design or research methods (such as in AI-assisted imaging approaches to generate or interpret the underlying research data, for example in the field of biomedical imaging). If this is done, such use must be described in a reproducible manner in the methods section. This should include an explanation of how the AI or AI-assisted tools were used in the image creation or alteration process, and the name of the model or tool, version and extension numbers, and manufacturer. Authors should adhere to the AI software’s specific usage policies and ensure correct content attribution. Where applicable, authors could be asked to provide pre-AI-adjusted versions of images and/or the composite raw images used to create the final submitted versions, for editorial assessment.
The use of generative AI or AI-assisted tools in the production of artwork such as for graphical abstracts is not permitted. The use of generative AI in the production of cover art may in some cases be allowed, if the author obtains prior permission from the journal editor and publisher, can demonstrate that all necessary rights have been cleared for the use of the relevant material, and ensures that there is correct content attribution.
When a researcher is invited to review another researcher’s paper, the manuscript must be treated as a confidential document. Reviewers should not upload a submitted manuscript or any part of it into a generative AI tool as this may violate the authors’ confidentiality and proprietary rights and, where the paper contains personally identifiable information, may breach data privacy rights.
This confidentiality requirement extends to the peer review report, as it may contain confidential information about the manuscript and/or the authors. For this reason, reviewers should not upload their peer review report into an AI tool, even if it is just for the purpose of improving language and readability.
Peer review is at the heart of the scientific ecosystem and Elsevier abides by the highest standards of integrity in this process. Reviewing a scientific manuscript implies responsibilities that can only be attributed to humans. Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies should not be used by reviewers to assist in the scientific review of a paper as the critical thinking and original assessment needed for peer review is outside of the scope of this technology and there is a risk that the technology will generate incorrect, incomplete or biased conclusions about the manuscript. The reviewer is responsible and accountable for the content of the review report.
Elsevier’s AI author policy states that authors are allowed to use generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process before submission, but only to improve the language and readability of their paper and with the appropriate disclosure, as per our instructions in Elsevier’s Guide for Authors. Reviewers can find such disclosure at the bottom of the paper in a separate section before the list of references.
Please note that Elsevier owns identity protected AI-assisted technologies which conform to the RELX Responsible AI Principles, such as those used during the screening process to conduct completeness and plagiarism checks and identify suitable reviewers. These in-house or licensed technologies respect author confidentiality. Our programs are subject to rigorous evaluation of bias and are compliant with data privacy and data security requirements.
A submitted manuscript must be treated as a confidential document. Editors should not upload a submitted manuscript or any part of it into a generative AI tool as this may violate the authors’ confidentiality and proprietary rights and, where the paper contains personally identifiable information, may breach data privacy rights.
This confidentiality requirement extends to all communication about the manuscript including any notification or decision letters as they may contain confidential information about the manuscript and/or the authors. For this reason, editors should not upload their letters into an AI tool, even if it is just for the purpose of improving language and readability.
Peer review is at the heart of the scientific ecosystem and Elsevier abides by the highest standards of integrity in this process. Managing the editorial evaluation of a scientific manuscript implies responsibilities that can only be attributed to humans. Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies should not be used by editors to assist in the evaluation or decision-making process of a manuscript as the critical thinking and original assessment needed for this work is outside of the scope of this technology and there is a risk that the technology will generate incorrect, incomplete or biased conclusions about the manuscript. The editor is responsible and accountable for the editorial process, the final decision and the communication thereof to the authors.
Elsevier’s AI author policy states that authors are allowed to use generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process before submission, but only to improve the language and readability of their paper and with the appropriate disclosure, as per our instructions in Elsevier’s Guide for Authors. Editors can find such disclosure at the bottom of the paper in a separate section before the list of references. If an editor suspects that an author or a reviewer has violated our AI policies, they should inform the publisher.
The ethics of generative artificial intelligence (AI) use in scientific manuscript content creation has become a serious matter of concern in the scientific publishing community. Generative AI has computationally become capable of elaborating research questions; refining programming code; generating text in scientific language; and generating images, graphics, or figures. However, this technology should be used with caution. In this editorial, we outline the current state of editorial policies on generative AI or chatbot use in authorship, peer review, and editorial processing of scientific and scholarly manuscripts. Additionally, we provide JMIR Publications’ editorial policies on these issues. We further detail JMIR Publications’ approach to the applications of AI in the editorial process for manuscripts in review in a JMIR Publications journal.
Technology tools are useful for making the scientific writing process more timely and effective. Many advances have been made in terms of the tools available to help conduct more sophisticated statistical analysis, manage references, and check grammar. Among these advances, large language model (LLMs) are neural networks trained on large corpora of textual information that can be fine-tuned to respond to natural language queries in a conversational fashion. In late 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot [1] that uses an LLM, which has become enormously popular and a focal point for regulatory debate in a matter of months. Since then, countless LLMs have been developed and launched for research, commercial, and other applications.
The ethics of generative AI use in scientific manuscript content creation has become a serious matter of concern in the scientific publishing community [2,3]. More generally, there are already broader calls for the regulation of AI, and LLMs in particular, in general public use [4,5]. This is because generative AI has computationally become capable of elaborating research questions; refining programming code; generating text in scientific language; and generating images, graphics, or figures. However, this technology should be used with caution. For instance, LLMs may produce errors and misleading information, especially when dealing with technical topics that they may have had limited data to train on. In the technical report released by OpenAI, it is acknowledged that Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)–4 can produce biased and unreliable content [6]. Such biased output can result from inherent biases in the data on which they were trained. A recent study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research showed that ChatGPT was able to generate a highly convincing, fraudulent scientific manuscript article in approximately 1 hour [7]. The authors used tools to detect AI-generated text (AI Detector and AI Text Classifier), and the results were inconclusive, indicating that these tools were unable to determine that the manuscript was generated by ChatGPT. Finally, the authors were able to detect mistakes in the generated article, specifically in the references, as ChatGPT generated fictitious citations. These findings reinforce the importance of having well-established regulations around the use of ChatGPT in the scientific field.
For authors of academic manuscripts, key issues of concern include the need to fact-check AI-generated content of any form (including but not limited to textual information or graphics); assign accountability for AI-generated information; and disclose transparently the use of generative AI in producing any scholarly or scientific work, especially when it impacts the meaning and content of the information submitted for potential publication [8]. For peer reviewers, additional issues pertain to the typical processing of manuscripts, wherein humans traditionally have generated peer review reports and issued editorial decisions on revising, rejecting, or accepting manuscripts. Currently, it is possible to prompt generative AI to facilitate these processes when given specific inputs and prompts as well. For editors, receiving AI-generated material in manuscripts (from authors) or in peer review reports (from peer reviewers) also warrant additional considerations.
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