Michael Okun, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Nottingham, announced his resignation on social media on 10 June, after journal officials told him they couldn’t turn off AI-related tools that automatically find potential peer reviewers.
The features are in the publisher’s Artificial Intelligence Research Assistant (AIRA) system, which Frontiers rolled out a few years ago in a bid to help editors carry out peer review, among other reasons. In an interview with The Transmitter, Okun explained that in early May he received a request from the journal to handle a manuscript on the dynamics of neuronal networks. He sent it out to around a half-dozen potential referees, but before any of them accepted his request, AIRA started sending out its own reviewer requests to other researchers, Okun says. Two referees AIRA contacted—who had no relevant expertise, according to Okun—accepted the referee requests.