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  • Serhat TutkalSerhatTutkal@fediscience.org
    Oct 5, 2026, 9:28 PM

    Lately, I've been seeing many complaints about LLM-generated reviews in academic journals, but the journal and publishing house names are usually not made public.

    One of my manuscripts was rejected by Ethnicities on January 28 this year. I sent an email to the journal and to SAGE's ethics team, stating that one of the reviewer reports was clearly generated by an LLM and that I had not authorized their reviewers to feed my manuscript into an LLM. If a journal uses LLMs in "peer" review, this should be made explicit. I was contacted by the #SAGE ethics team on February 26 and informed that they were going to conduct an investigation. I wrote back on May 23 to ask about the outcome of the investigation and I received a response stating that I was going to be updated soon. It is October and I am yet to receive a response. It seems like I can't publicly share my article when it is published in one of their journals but they can do whatever they want with my manuscripts without bothering with prior notice. I am naming the journal and the publishing house so that people can make informed decisions when they submit their manuscripts in the future.

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Replies

  • Lins&lins_c@kolektiva.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 2:46 AM

    @SerhatTutkal i hope it won't be long before journals are abandoned entirely.

    they're far too easy to corrupt and far too controling, while de-legitimizing entirely valid and effective research by people whom can't or won't use them.

    monetary incentives are important for survival, but at this rate it may well be much easier for many to survive by supporting and relying on community and mutual aid, within our lifetimes.

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  • Serhat TutkalSerhatTutkal@fediscience.org
    Oct 6, 2026, 5:18 AM

    @lins_c I most certainly hope to see the end of commercial academic publishing at some point. I think one only realizes how ridiculous the whole thing is when they try to explain it to someone outside the academia. But if we really want to improve things, we will have to throw all quantitative metrics away (which would require academics to actually read other academics and evaluate their work based on what they wrote).

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  • Serhat TutkalSerhatTutkal@fediscience.org
    Oct 6, 2026, 5:24 AM

    @Minnesota411988 Normally if someone doesn't want to review a manuscript they will just reject the invitation. I mean, why would you accept it if you are not even going to skim through the paper? It also doesn't make sense as an editorial policy because you could have just desk rejected the manuscript. Are they trying to improve their average response time after peer review? Or do people actually believe that LLMs can legitimately review papers?

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  • RamsesRamses_X@chaos.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 6:35 PM

    @SerhatTutkal @Minnesota411988 Reviewing is considered an honour and a marker of prestige making it something you want to do till you notice how much work it actually is. And then you can't reject doing it, as you need those prestige points to get more financing for your own work.

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  • Adam Jacobs 🇺🇦statsguy@mas.to
    Oct 7, 2026, 9:44 AM

    @SerhatTutkal Something I discovered when a journal published a peer reviewed article that libelled me is that there is absolutely no mechanism for regulating journals. Journal editors can do whatever the hell they want, the only constraint being whether their publisher has any sense of ethics (spoiler alert: they don't).

    Other than that your only option is legal action, which is way too expensive for 99% of us.

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  • Serhat TutkalSerhatTutkal@fediscience.org
    Oct 7, 2026, 3:56 PM

    @statsguy Yes, it is particularly difficult when you are not based in a country with one of their offices. I guess we are all too busy searching for the next contract or collecting points for the next performance evaluation, so no time for trying to increase our control over the publication process of our findings.

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