Section: AI and Academic Publishing

What Are Sections?

Sections are curated clusters of thematically related content that accrue on an ongoing basis for a time frame of three or more years. KULA was established to create space for intellectual exchange on topics related to knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation, and the goal of sections is to generate dialogue on issues relevant to the journal’s mandate through short, topical pieces. These contributions often take the form of editorials, which do not undergo traditional anonymous peer review but instead go through a collaborative, open editorial review process in which the section editor and two editorial board members provide comments to help contributors flesh out and refine their ideas.

Section editors supervise the publication of several submissions per year. In this way, section editors and contributors build a collection of scholarship on a particular issue—much like a special issue—but extend the production of that scholarship over several years, allowing contributors time to respond to and build on the work of other scholars.

Section Description

The editorials in this section take a speculative approach to the topic of artificial intelligence and equity in academic publishing. The transformative potential of AI in academic knowledge production has been a topic of considerable discussion, particularly since the widespread attention brought on by ChatGPT. However, the development and integration of AI have predominantly been shaped by the interests of publishers and surveillance-based publishing. While AI offers promising advancements and improved efficiency for the publishing industry, there are unaddressed concerns about the potential biases, ethical implications, and unforeseen consequences that could arise from adding AI to an already highly inequitable system. AI thus prompts us to question and rethink our relationships with our processes for knowledge production, and the pieces in this section explore what AI could be from different ontological and epistemological perspectives without the constraints of publishers.

KULA welcomes submissions in diverse formats. The thought pieces in this section may include textual articles or reflections and multimodal outputs including, but not limited to, photo essays, video essays, podcasts, graphic novels, and other forms of visual art works and audio and/or video content. 

Section Editor: Leslie Chan, Associate Professor, Department of Global Development Studies; Director, Knowledge Equity Lab, University of Toronto Scarborough

Open submissions accepted: No

Submission Instructions 

1. Create a user account on the KULA website. If you have an ORCID iD, you can connect your ORCID iD to your user account.
2. Go to the submission wizard to submit your work.

• Choose the relevant section for your submission (e.g., research article, project report, etc.).
• Choose the category “AI and Academic Publishing” for your submission. (Please note that OJS uses the term section differently than we do; section in OJS is equivalent to article type, while category refers to how we use section.)
• Read and acknowledge submission requirements.
• If applicable, add any additional information for the section editor in the “Comments for the Editor” box. 
• Acknowledge copyright statement.
• Click “Save and continue.”
• Upload your submission. If you are submitting something for double-anonymized review, please remove any identifying information from your submission before uploading it.
• Enter the metadata for your submission, including an abstract, keywords, etc.
• Review your submission and submit.

Please see the KULA submissions page for more detail about submission requirements.

If you have any questions about the submission process, please reach out to Co-Editor-in-Chief Samantha MacFarlane at kulajournal@uvic.ca.