Unpacking the theme for Peer Review Week 2025: Rethinking peer review in the AI era

The theme for Peer Review Week (September 15–19, 2025) is Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era. Peer Review Week is a global virtual event that celebrates the essential role of peer review not just in the scholarly publishing ecosystem but also for the advancement of knowledge. Every year, this event brings publishers, editors, reviewers, authors, and service/solution providers together to discuss the most pressing challenges facing peer review.  

The Peer Review Week 2025 theme spotlights the transformative, and potentially disruptive, impact of AI on peer review and scholarly publishing. It aims to spark global conversations about balancing AI’s potential benefits for making peer review more efficient with the core human values of integrity, transparency, and trust in the scientific enterprise. 

What this theme invites us to explore 

Given the recent and continuing increase in the adoption of AI in various scholarly publishing processes, this theme invites the global scholarly community to think about and propose solutions for the responsible use of AI in research and publishing. Some areas of discussion that arise from this theme include: 

• The role of AI in scholarly publishing and ethical boundaries: How can AI-powered tools help improve aspects such as reviewer selection, detection of ethics violations such as plagiarism and data fabrication, or ease manuscript evaluation? More importantly, how can AI support all this while preserving fairness, accountability, and core publication ethics principles? 
• Transparency and disclosure: What standards should guide disclosing the use of AI by authors, reviewers, or editors? How do we ensure transparency without compromising on the integrity of peer review? 
• AI literacy and reviewer support: What training and resources do reviewers need to responsibly navigate AI-generated content and AI-based tools? 
• Bias, fairness, and trust: Can AI help mitigate the impact of human bias in peer review, or could it amplify it? How can AI-assisted processes be more auditable and trustworthy? 
• Human-led judgement vs. machine-driven decision: Which aspects of the scholarly research and publishing process should unconditionally be overseen by humans? Which processes can be automated? How do we preserve the essential human perspective in peer review even as AI tools become ubiquitous? 
• Emerging models of peer review: Can AI enable new approaches such as like structured reviews or reproducibility checks, that complement or transform traditional peer review models? 

Why this matters now 

AI is no longer a futuristic possibility in peer review. It is already being integrated into editorial workflows, manuscript screening, and even review assistance systems. However, the scholarly publishing community is beginning to delve deeper into the responsible use of AI in scholarly publishing. The theme for Peer Review Week 2025 highlights the urgent need for the ethical AI integration in order to ensure trust in scholarly communication. 

What are your thoughts on this theme? How do you see the human-AI interaction taking shape in scholarly publishing?