Integrating AI into Kotahi: How to Quantify Its Contribution? | Coko

Written by Paul Shannon, John Chodacki, Nokome Bentley, Adam Hyde, Ryan Dix-Peek, Yannis Barlas and Ben Whitmore

Recently, a team of technologists from across the globe came together in New Zealand to brainstorm how to integrate AI into the peer review process using Kotahi responsibly. We recognize the potential benefits that AI can bring, such as increased efficiency and accuracy, but we also acknowledge the need to be thoughtful about how we implement this technology. As a result, we engaged in a collaborative brainstorming session to explore how AI could be integrated into our platform responsibly and effectively. In this article, we will share some of our key insights and considerations from this session.

As the scientific publishing landscape continues to evolve, many are looking to AI as a potential solution to streamline the publishing process. At Kotahi, we’ve been thinking about how AI can be integrated into our platform to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the whole process.

Types of AI contributions

One question we’ve been grappling with is how to be transparent and honest about AI’s contribution and quantify its impact. Our approach was to first distinguish between different applications of AI technologies so we can better distinguish boundaries for where they are appropriate:

Computer-assisted humans use AI to help with certain tasks, such as identifying potential conflicts of interest or suggesting potential reviewers.
Generative AI, on the other hand, can create original content, such as writing summaries or even entire manuscripts.

By establishing this foundational distinction between these two approaches, we have a clearer understanding of the role that AI should play in the publication process.

Publishing is collaboration

While AI can help with certain tasks, such as identifying potential reviewers, it is important to remember that humans must continue to play the primary role in the publishing process. Authors and reviewers provide invaluable feedback and insights that cannot be replicated by AI alone. Therefore, we need to find a way to integrate AI into the publishing process transparently that also does not diminish the importance of human input.

One potential solution that maintains this distinction is to, for example, offer AI assistance to a reviewer directly in the reviewer form (as an opt-in) to help them turn their review notes (possibly in bullet points) into readable sentences and paragraphs that use a constructive, respectful tone suitable for a review. This would allow reviewers to choose whether or not they want to use AI to assist them in their reviews while also offering transparency about the use of AI in the review process.

 

Designing for Emergent Workflow Cultures: eLife, PRC, and Kotahi | CommonPlace, Series 2.2 Community-led Editorial Management

Hyde, A., Pattinson, D., & Shannon, P. (2022). Designing for Emergent Workflow Cultures: eLife, PRC, and Kotahi. Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.ef6691ea

Abstract

Scholarly publishing is evolving, and there is a need to understand and design the new (emergent) workflows while also designing technology to capture and support these processes. This article documents an ongoing collaboration to develop technology to meet emergent workflows in scholarly publishing, namely Publish-Review-Curate (PRC). We explore this topic with different eLife PRC community stakeholders using Kotahi, a flexible open-source scholarly publishing platform that can support variant workflows (built by Coko).

 

 

OA Publishing Platform | Scholarly Community | ReachOA

“Amnet, through its collaboration with Coko, has developed an OA publishing platform ReachOA, which is aimed at addressing present scholarly publishing challenges and at helping the scholarly community do more with less. Our focus is to offer the best open access tools for the scholarly publishers the world over and to help members explore the potential of open access journals and take advantage of them.

ReachOA powered by Kotahi, is a full-featured modern publishing platform designed to digitize content publishing including science journals, micropublications, preprints and more. Its range of rich features and optimized workflow simplify the end-to-end process, making it easy for article publishers to create, review, revise, and publish their works….”

eLife extends support for Coko’s work on open-source publishing solutions | For the press | eLife

eLife is pleased to announce today its ongoing support for Coko to develop open-source software solutions for publishing, including Kotahi – a new journal platform that can also help facilitate the publication and review of preprints.

Announcing EnableOA | Coko

Coko has been building some significant partnerships since mid 2019. Today we are proud to announce EnableOA, an outcome of one of these collaborations with publishing services provider Amnet.

EnableOA is an exciting new initiative to bring professional hosting and publishing services to the Open Access world via Cokos open source platforms Editoria and Kotahi. This is a very important new evolution in the world of OA which traditionally has been lacking best of breed, modern, open source infrastructure and professional publishing services. This partnership brings both to Open Access and we are looking forward to working with Amnet in the months and years to come to help publishers publish content faster and cheaper while retaining the high quality productions they expect.

The following is the Press Release from Amnet. If you would like to learn more emails are located at the bottom of the article!

Announcing EnableOA | Coko

Coko has been building some significant partnerships since mid 2019. Today we are proud to announce EnableOA, an outcome of one of these collaborations with publishing services provider Amnet.

EnableOA is an exciting new initiative to bring professional hosting and publishing services to the Open Access world via Cokos open source platforms Editoria and Kotahi. This is a very important new evolution in the world of OA which traditionally has been lacking best of breed, modern, open source infrastructure and professional publishing services. This partnership brings both to Open Access and we are looking forward to working with Amnet in the months and years to come to help publishers publish content faster and cheaper while retaining the high quality productions they expect.

The following is the Press Release from Amnet. If you would like to learn more emails are located at the bottom of the article!

Announcement: Coko partners with Amnet Systems to build Open Infrastructure : Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

“Coko and Amnet Systems are proud to announce a collaborative partnership to fast track projects beneficial to the open access community for Emergency Response Publishing.

Coko, a leading provider of open source publishing solutions in the not-for-profit sector, and Amnet Systems Private Limited a leading publishing and accessibility services provider, announced an exciting collaboration to fast track projects beneficial to the Open Access Community. The relationship is focused on Emergency Response Publishing (ERP) in response to the global pandemic environment and the aftermath.

The scholarly communications sector needs modern technologies and radically optimized workflows to respond to this current pandemic crisis — ERP is a new Coko project to provide these technologies and improved workflows and pave the way for future modernization of the publishing sector….

To this end, we are happy to announce that Amnet will dedicate significant resources to collaborate on the development of Coko’s state-of-the-art open source journal platform – Kotahi. Amnet has committed full-time developers to collaborate with the Coko team to accelerate the development of the Kotahi platform….”

 

Announcement: Coko partners with Amnet Systems to build Open Infrastructure : Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

“Coko and Amnet Systems are proud to announce a collaborative partnership to fast track projects beneficial to the open access community for Emergency Response Publishing.

Coko, a leading provider of open source publishing solutions in the not-for-profit sector, and Amnet Systems Private Limited a leading publishing and accessibility services provider, announced an exciting collaboration to fast track projects beneficial to the Open Access Community. The relationship is focused on Emergency Response Publishing (ERP) in response to the global pandemic environment and the aftermath.

The scholarly communications sector needs modern technologies and radically optimized workflows to respond to this current pandemic crisis — ERP is a new Coko project to provide these technologies and improved workflows and pave the way for future modernization of the publishing sector….

To this end, we are happy to announce that Amnet will dedicate significant resources to collaborate on the development of Coko’s state-of-the-art open source journal platform – Kotahi. Amnet has committed full-time developers to collaborate with the Coko team to accelerate the development of the Kotahi platform….”