Beyond efficiency: How artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape scientific inquiry and the publication process

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how research is conceived, executed, published, and shared. This editorial examines the “elephant in the room”: the integration of AI across every stage of the research life cycle and publication pipeline. We trace AI’s expanding footprint on the author side, from sparking novel research ideas, mapping literature, and designing studies, to simulating data, analyzing results, and drafting manuscripts. We also consider AI’s growing role on the journal side, including automated manuscript triage, AI-assisted peer review, decision synthesis, and revision checks. And we discuss AI’s impact on research dissemination. Throughout, we highlight not only the unprecedented opportunities for creativity, efficiency, and accessibility, but also the ethical risks, such as epistemic homogenization, challenges to accountability, and the loss of scholarly craft. We urge researchers, editors, and institutions not to fall into the false binary of blind optimism or blanket skepticism. Instead, we call for deliberate engagement: a principled, transparent, and reflexive partnership between human scholars and machine collaborators. The question is no longer whether we want AI to shape the future of scholarship—it already is. The challenge now is to ensure that what it amplifies is not only our productivity, but our judgment, imagination, and collective responsibility in knowledge creation and dissemination.