Developed by the TPR editorial Team: Genie Nicole Giaimo, Joseph Cheatle, Wenqi Cui, Rabail Qayyum, and Andrew Yim
Upshot of policies for TPR contributors and reviewers:
Authors who use AI tools in any part of the writing or development of their submission must disclose this in their materials and methods sections as well as in a preamble to the peer review submission process so that reviewers are made aware of AI tool use.
Further, we ask that reviewers for our journal refrain from using AI to produce/create feedback on drafts as this engages in non-consensual use of AI that inputs scholars’ original work without permission.
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While TPR understands that there are many ways to use GenerativeAI in academic writing, we would like to create a clear set of expectations around ethical use and disclosure of using GenAI tools in the research/writing process for our peer reviewed journal.
We align with many other academic publishers and journals, such as the Elsevier journals and the Journal of Second Language Writing’s submission guidelines, which focus on using GenerativeAI technologies as a tool to “improve readability and language, not to replace key researcher tasks such as interpreting data or drawing scientific conclusions.”
Further borrowing from TESOL Quarterly and Wiley’s Statement on this matter:
We require that authors using ChatGPT or other GenerativeAI programs follow the Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidelines, namely, “Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.” (Also, see Wiley’s statement on this issue.)
We discourage the use of AI programs to write wholesale sections of your manuscript, however, as IUP notes “we see these tools as providing greater access among diverse writers including but not limited to those who are multilingual writers, who speak non-standard dialects, or who have language-based disabilities” (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2024).
AI may be used for feedback, editing, and paraphrasing help, to generate prompts and instruments, to code and analyze data, or to generate data for simulations. In all cases, AI use must be noted in the manuscript. Be aware that AI does not generate the same output each time, so for some uses, the results may therefore not be replicable. In the interest of transparency, if you use AI, save and date all output and note which program (and version) you used. You might also want to redo any analyses at a later point to determine how the output has changed. The same is true if AI programs or output is the object of your study.
Finally, TPR is a journal focused on mentorship of new and under-represented voices in the field of writing center studies; therefore, “we encourage writers to consider critically and reflect on when their language forms and voice may be more appropriate than AI language standardization” (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2024).