Un/Sustainable Peer Review and Generative AI: Ethical Gaps, Editorial Acceleration, and the Whitewashing of Technological Solutionism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Generative AI in peer review raises ethical and environmental concerns and risks deepening existing inequities in scholarly publishing. Celebrated gains in speed often mask declines in quality and accountability. Training and deploying large models impose environmental costs. In editorial workflows, AI can privilege technical fixes over structural reform, and evidence shows it reproduces human biases while being cast as neutral. We call for a renewed commitment to open-science principles anchored in human oversight, deep sustainability, and broader justice. The paper concludes by interrogating sustainability’s absence from green-economy debates and mapping the values likely to shape the future of peer review.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.267 | 0.506 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".