The publishing giant Wiley is urging publishers to be proactive in creating policies and guidelines around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) after receiving feedback from almost 5000 researchers.
ExplanAItions was set up to survey researchers on how they are currently using AI and how they might be interested in using it in the future. In addition, Wiley wanted to uncover what researchers want from publishers in terms of guidelines, training and policies. The researchers represented a wide range of disciplines, geographies, career phases and sectors, and nearly all had previously submitted an article for publication or were planning to do so in the near future.
The survey revealed that current use of AI among researchers is fairly limited, both in terms of tools used and tasks done. However, despite this, researchers said that developing AI skills would be highly important to them personally in the near future.
Uncertainty was found to be a major barrier to making the most of AI’s potential, and nearly two-thirds of researchers cited a lack of guidance and training preventing them from using AI to the extent that they would like.
There was no consensus among researchers on where to go for guidance on using AI, with 70% of researchers saying they wanted publishers to provide clear guidelines on which uses of AI are acceptable when publishing scholarly research. This prompted Wiley to state that, although researchers may not think of publishers as their first line of support in using AI, publishers needed to be ‘proactive in creating policies and guidelines and in communicating them to the research community’.
Wiley also constructed a three-tiered framework to help researchers explore the potential for AI to serve them in their research. ‘Act’ highlights the current-use cases where AI is already poised to make a difference and interest is high, including manuscript preparation and writing assistance and handling large information sets. ‘Watch’ refers to the near-term opportunities with high interest and growing AI capabilities, such as generating predictions and recommendations and offloading essential but less engaging work. Finally, ‘envision’ refers to the ‘ambitious use’ cases that are not yet feasible, such as using AI to enhance research methods and collaboration or for peer review processes.
Wiley said it would continue to track these trends to understand where AI is ready to go, where it needs work and where ‘human expertise and capability cannot be substituted’.
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