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Are special issues of journals becoming the norm rather than the exception? How will GenAI interact with this process?

This is a really interesting analysis of the growth of special issues as a commercial strategy by journals, emerging in the grey zone between traditional and predatory publishing:

Since 2000, this practice has been turned into a commercial strategy by new publishers such as Hindawi, MDPI and Frontiers to accelerate growth and generate revenue. In some cases, the number of special issues they publish has increased exorbitantly (Huang et al. 2022) to far outnumber regular issues (Oviedo-García 2021). This exponential increase has led to growing concerns about the editorial standards set by these new publishers (Petrou 2023). There has been a particular focus on MDPI (Petrou 2020; Brockington 2022; Crosetto 2021), and to a lesser extent Frontiers and Hindawi (Petrou 2023).

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2024.2374567

In the case of Hindawi, bought by Wiley for $300 million, there were mass retractions driven by recognition of widespread malpractice in the contents of these special issues. As the authors point out this demonstrates “the profits that SIs generate within an “author-pays” publishing model generates, along with the risks that come with rapid expansion and the prioritization of volume over quality.”

The usual special issues enables journals to scale more rapidly, effectively by outsourcing aspects of the process to networks which are external to them. When income is tied to individual contributions, failing to scale in this way leaves potential income unrealised. To the extent the journal is expected to run as a commercial enterprise, there will be pressure to realise potential income.

What concerns me is that GenAI will (a) increase the potential supply of submissions by increasing the productivity, narrowly construed, of at least some researchers (b) offer alibis for ensuring research integrity through GenAI triaging, supplements or replacements to human review.

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