Image – Getty: Creative Credit
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Upholding Quality
Not a day goes by when you don’t hear of one service or another “powered by AI,” and one such offering has been announced in the last week in academic and scholarly publishing by Springer Nature.
Its new “AI-driven tool,” seemingly unnamed, is intended “to help editors and peer reviewers by automating a number of editorial quality checks and alerting editors to potentially unsuitable manuscripts so that they can be held back from peer reviewers by automating a number of editorial quality checks and alerting editors to potentially unsuitable manuscripts so that they can be held back from peer review.”
This functionality has been developed in-house, the company says, and is meant to be integrated into the company’s “next-generation article-submission article submission and processing platform, Snapp, following the inclusion in 2024 of two AI tools to identify fake content.”
Related article: Springer Nature in the UK: Two AI Tools Aim at Fake Research. Image – Getty: Viktoria Voievodina
You can see an article from Publishing Perspectives from last June on the company’s assertion that it was deploying those two AI tools to detect fake content and image integrity. Those two systems are called Geppetto and SnappShot, respectively.
The new element is being tested on more than 100 open-access journals, the company’s media messaging says, “including Scientific Reports… and across more than 100,000 submissions.”
‘We Can Help Speed Up Everyday Tasks for Researchers’
It’s interesting that Springer Nature’s announcements about its “AI-driven tools” are generally couched in a context of being assistive to writer-researchers. The tasks assigned to these tools, however, seem to be more about protecting the company from flawed, substandard, or flatly illicit content. It’s hard to determine who stands more to benefit from these AI tools.
In its promotional descriptive commentary on this development, Springer Nature writes, “The AI tool supports editors and peer reviewers by quickly addressing manuscript quality issues, reducing the number of amendments needed, and maintaining the integrity of a high-quality publishing process.
“In each instance, a human expert double-checks the results before a final decision is made. It marks the next phase of the publisher’s investment in emerging technologies to enhance the publishing experience for researchers, editors and reviewers, all of which are developed in line with its AI principles.”
Harsh Jegadeesan
In a comment on the announcement of a third “AI-driven” element of its offering, the company’s chief publishing officer, Harsh Jegadeesan, is quoted, saying, “Publishing trusted research is at the heart of what we do. As the volume of research increases, we are excited to see how we can best use AI to support our authors, editors, and peer reviewers, simplifying their ways of working while upholding quality.
“By carefully introducing new ways of checking papers to enhance research integrity and support editorial decision-making we can help speed up everyday tasks for researchers, freeing them up to concentrate on what matters to them–conducting research.”
In concluding its statement to the news media, the company says that 14 “suitability assessment “steps are currently supported before a manuscript is sent out to review including data availability statements, human and animal ethics, clinical trials, and misuse threats.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on open artificial intelligence is here, more on scholarly and academic publishing is here, and more on Springer Nature is here.