Open-access scholarly publisher Frontiers has announced the integration of Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA) into its digital peer-review platform to enable better, more efficient quality control and manuscript handling. AIRA assists editors, reviewers and internal teams by analysing, interpreting and communicating the quality of submitted manuscripts and the review process, as well as suggesting actions and identifying potential reviewers. Built in-house and fully integrated into the Frontiers Review Forum and internal workflows, these groundbreaking capabilities have already streamlined Frontiers' publishing process, and will continually drive further optimisation through ongoing learning and inclusion of new quality checks.
High-quality peer review is fundamental to scholarly publishing, certifying the validity, rigour and correctness of research hypotheses, methods and conclusions. The challenge for publishers and reviewers alike is maintaining rigorous quality standards in the face of ever-increasing manuscript submissions.
AIRA currently addresses two key peer review tasks: quality control and reviewer identification. Its algorithms quickly and accurately evaluate submitted manuscripts against a set of quality measures, including text overlap, language, the presence of human images and other ethical considerations. Those meeting a defined quality threshold are passed to editorial assignment, while any with potential issues are flagged to Frontiers' Research Integrity and Review Operations Teams for further investigation - and will not go into review until and if resolved.
AIRA's algorithms also identify potential reviewers based on expertise and availability, and check for potential conflicts of interests between editors, reviewers and authors - with further checks being converted from manual to AI-driven to evaluate the quality of the review itself. These are major steps forward in ensuring independent review of all manuscripts by the right experts in a field.
The system was built in-house from custom algorithms as well as industry-leading tools, for example, Google, iThenticate by CrossRef and Ada by Editage. All have been trained and rigorously tested using Frontiers' 10 years of peer review experience and are fully integrated into Frontiers' Collaborative Review Forum and internal processes.
AIRA is the culmination of 10 years of publishing experience and innovation by Frontiers. An early Open Access pioneer, Frontiers was the first to take scientific publishing entirely online through a suite of powerful, digital tools - all built and maintained in-house. These include an award-winning Open Science platform that makes high-quality, peer-reviewed research articles freely available to everyone around the world; a collaborative peer-review platform allowing real-time interactions between editors, reviewers and authors; and a virtual editorial office for editors to enhance efficiency, oversight and quality control.
Frontiers also pioneered alternative author and article metrics that provide objective ways to evaluate research impact, and launched the first social network fully integrated into a publishing platform, Loop, to maximise author and article discoverability.
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