GenAI and scholarly publishing

As well as being used by students, AI tools have also been used in academic publishing papers, with some authors even listing, or trying to list, the tool as a co-author. This has raised the question of whether a Large Language Model (LLM) can be considered an academic author. As authorship in academia is understood in a different way to authorship of a newspaper article or short story, this has ignited much debate and differing opinions, 

In late January 2023, both Springer-Nature group and Science journals published stances on their use of AI in their journals. Nature has advised that no LLM or AI tool with be accepted as a credited author on a paper as these tools cannot take accountability for the work. But they will accept research papers where the tools have been used if the appropriate acknowledgement is made. Science also does not allow AI to be credited as the author and has updated its license and editorial policies to make it explicit that text, figures, images, or graphics generated or produced by AI or LLMs cannot be used in submitted work.

Elsevier, which publishes almost 3,000 journals including Lancet and Cell, has taken a similar stance. While it does not allow AI to be an author, it can be used to improve the readability and language of the article as long as it is declared how the tools have been used.

You can find additional general information on publishing and AI in the Publication & AI chapter of  the Charles Sturt University Open Education Resource Using AI tools at university.