Conviviality and standards: open access publishing after AI

As new areas of academic research proliferate (and cross-pollinate), scholarly digital publishing makes it possible to grow online networks around research interests without relying on the slow, gate-keeping procedures of traditional print publishing. In this way, advances in digital technology continue to offer scholars a wider readership and more meaningful peer networks, but these benefits come at a cost. Without a reliable economic model, the labor of peer-reviewing, editing, formatting, distributing and marketing scholarly writing and research is, in many cases, taken on by the scholars themselves. Digital tools make publishing workflows considerably more efficient and faster, but the unpaid labor involved is still a hindrance to any sustainable models for publishing scholarly work.   

Automation is often framed as a tool to increase productivity and efficiency by diminishing the role of fallible humans in a technical process. In the case of digital editing, the automation of grammar and spell check is labor saved for a deeper and more attentive reading of a text, where more subtle errors might lie in the author’s very argument. AI publishing technologies promise to improve not only editing texts, but detecting plagiarism, checking sources, seeking out peer reviewers, converting files, formatting for multiple platforms, marketing on social media and analyzing metrics. What remains of scholarly digital publishing as an activity when AI and Machine Learning tools absorb the considerable technical labor involved? Scholars (as researchers, writers, editors, and publishers) might be freed to concentrate on ideas themselves. By removing technical barriers and potential friction in publishing workflows, AI and ML might make way for a greater flow among scholars in the evaluation and dissemination of research and theories. AI might make scholarly digital publishing more convivial. 

Ivan Illich, in his Tools for Conviviality, considers a convivial society as one in which individuals have the means, tools, incentives and desire for collaboration. Conviviality escapes a rigid hierarchical and standardized process and seeks out diverse and innovative voices because it is sustained by individuals who choose to be a part of something that is at once self-serving and for the greater good. Scholarly digital publishing, especially open-access publishing, is already modelling this kind of shared labour in the service of both the individual scholars seeking to publish their work and the fields of research made up of a community of peers. While there are concerns with any new AI technology, especially the human biases embedded in algorithms, AI tools targeted for repetitive publishing tasks can open an opportunity to shape a renaissance in convivial scholarly publishing that sacrifices neither academic standards nor individual innovation and creativity.