Democratizing Knowledge Creation Through Human-AI Collaboration in Academic Peer Review

In the rapidly evolving landscape of academic research, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize traditional academic peer review processes and knowledge evaluation systems. We believe that the growing collaboration between humans and AI will disrupt how academics assess scholarly manuscripts and disseminate published works in a way that facilitates the closing of gaps among diverse scholars as well as competing scholarly traditions. Such human -AI collaboration is not a distant reality but is unfolding before us, in part, through the development, application, and actual use of AI, including language learning models (LLMs). This opinion piece focuses on the academic peer review process. It offers preliminary ideas on how human -AI collaboration will likely change the peer review process, highlights the benefits, identifies possible bottlenecks, and underscores the potential for democratizing academic culture worldwide.