Emergence of the metaverse and ChatGPT in journal publishing after the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

As soon as I took office as president of the Korean Council of Science Editors (KCSE) on January 17, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Therefore, most workshops and seminars held by the KCSE were operated online. The training programs designed were all executed without any difficulties. There were four workshops in 2020, 11 in 2021, and nine in 2022. The editors and staff of the KCSE’s member institutes participated in these events more actively than before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the number of participants increased. Even before the pandemic, scholarly journal publishing had already been digitalized and implemented online through manuscript management systems (e-submission systems); therefore, the pandemic did not cause operational problems. The number of submissions during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic soared, especially in the medical field [1] and on the topic of COVID-19 itself. Many scientific articles have helped medical professionals care for persons infected with COVID-19. Therefore, scientific journals received a very high level of recognition as a valuable resource for society as a whole during this critical pandemic. I am delighted to see that scientific, technological, and medical journals in Korea have played a pivotal role in combating COVID-19, and I am proud to have served as the president of the organization of those journal editors for 3 years. I applaud our members for their devotion to journal publishing as editor-publishers [2]. As I complete my term as president, I would like to emphasize two emerging trends in journal publishing: the metaverse and artificial intelligence. Regarding the latter topic, I wish to discuss ChatGPT and some issues related to its use in scholarly publishing.