Note from the Editor
I am pleased to announce the formation of two committees of editors of our journal to deliberate on important and complicated current issues facing scholarly publishing.
The first one is the Committee on Generative AI. This committee arises from the rapidly changing landscape of generative AI and its use among authors, reviewers, and editors. IJOC already has a policy disallowing the use of generative AI for reviewing, but the scope needs to be broader and more flexible. We have started to see a few papers submitted to the journal that have clearly used generative AI in their authorship of the literature review. This has become relatively easy to spot when one or more references appear real but are fake, that is, a product of the AI’s hallucination. So far, we have rejected those papers on the basis of submitting false information. Vetting papers for phony references has now become part of our protocol for submitted papers. But we need a more considered approach that encompasses the roles of editing, reviewing, and authoring, recognizing that the judicious and controlled use of generative AI can be beneficial to all. The committee consists of Stefan Wild (chair) of Argonne National Laboratory, Xin Li of City University of Hong Kong, Nicola Secomandi of Rice University, Paul Brooks of Virginia Commonwealth University, and Willem-Jan Van Hoeve of Carnegie Mellon University.
The focus of the second committee is equally vital and challenging—the topic is archiving of data, code, and digital artifacts of papers published in IJOC. But there are many aspects of this topic that need careful investigation and deliberation, such as the following:
Should items to be archived be vetted? If so, how and by whom?
What is the best platform and format to store and share these items?
Should the process begin with submission, thus requiring submission of data and code when the paper is first submitted, making vetting a part of the review process?
The committee is comprised of Willem-Jan Van Hoeve of Carnegie Mellon University (chair), Ted Ralphs of Lehigh University, Margarida Carvalho of Universite de Montreal, and Marc Pfetsch of Technische Universität Darmstadt. They will also be considering whether this committee should be ongoing, that is, a standing committee to continuously evaluate the relevant landscape.
We have been on the leading edge of this for the INFORMS set of journals with our IJOC GitHub Site, which houses 220+ repositories of published papers, https://informsjoc.github.io/. This has been so impactful that we have recently designated four associate editors as data and software specialists. These are Oscar Dowson, independent scholar; Quentin Cappart, École Polytechnique de Montréal; Carlos Cardonha, University of Connecticut; and Margarita Castro, Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile.
I think we can all agree that the two issues outlined above are of growing impact on the scholarly publication process and that they are in a state of great flux given technological advancements and proliferation of use. The work of these two committees will be invaluable to IJOC and deserves appreciation from all of us within the research community.
Alice E. Smith
Editor-in-Chief
