How to break the publication queue spell: the blueprints are finally on the table

How much time have we lost lately preparing manuscripts forjournal submission? Reformatting references for each new venue, filling inmetadata fields the system could extract itself, drafting cover letters,ticking compliance boxes, uploading files in the order the interface demands -and then repeating the whole performance at the next journal when the first onesays "no" after fourteen months of deliberation? What is the mostlong-suffering paper on your CV, the one whose references were already ageing gracefullyby the time it finally appeared in print?

Submission volumes keep growing while the pool of availablereviewers and editors has not kept pace, and the system has responded to thispressure the way overstretched bureaucracies always do: by adding more forms,more declarations, more fields that ask for the same information in slightlydifferent ways across three consecutive screens. Many colleagues have moved toarXiv or SSRN to sidestep the wait and get their work visible immediately.Their logic is understandable, yet what these platforms offer is visibilitybefore any institutional evaluation, and visibility alone is not what makesresearch findings citable as evidence, actionable in policy, or trusted as abasis for further work. The queue gets longer, the workarounds multiply, andthe architecture underneath it all remains exactly as it was designed in 2001,apparently awaiting the return of its original authors before anyone can touchit.

A genuinely interesting way out of this dead-end wasproposed recently by Luciano Floridi, philosopher of information and digitalethicist at Yale and the University of Bologna, in his article "Theeditor's signature: a proposal for AI-born journals," now available onSSRN. Floridi introduces two concepts that reframe the whole situation. Thefirst is the AI-assisted journal: a venue that adds AI tools to anexisting workflow while leaving every incentive intact to keep generating newprocedural requirements until the saved hours are quietly consumed by the nextcompliance update. The second is the AI-born journal: a venue whoseentire architecture was designed from scratch around what AI agents canreliably do today. Floridi's central interest is in specifying thatarchitecture in enough concrete detail to show how AI can absorb everythingsurrounding the editorial act, so that editors are left doing what they areactually there to do: weighing reviewer opinion against the state of the field,deciding which objections are decisive, and accepting personal accountabilityfor the conclusion.

The architecture works as follows. The author submits themanuscript once, in whatever format they wrote it, with no reformatting for thejournal's house style. An agent extracts metadata directly from the file andthe author reviews and corrects the extraction in about ten minutes, which isroughly the time currently spent on one metadata field that requires enteringthe same information twice for reasons nobody alive can reconstruct. A secondagent runs integrity checks and produces a report for the editor. A third agentgenerates a ranked list of candidate reviewers drawn from co-citation patterns, ORCID profiles, OpenAlex records, and recent reviewing load; the editor selectsfrom it, and the agent manages invitations and follow-ups. Reviewers receive astructural pre-analysis that maps the paper's claims, summarises itsmethodology, and situates it against the cited literature, so each reviewer canmove directly to the judgment only they can make. When the reviews arrive, afifth agent synthesises them into a draft decision letter; the editor reads theoriginal reviews alongside the draft, revises what needs revising, and signs.

The governance layer presumes that every agent output isreversible by the editor without friction, and every override is logged for theeditorial board to inspect on a rolling basis, because "the editor remainsin charge" is only a convincing statement when the architecture is willingto show exactly how.

The philosophical foundation underneath this design explainswhich functions the architecture deliberately preserves. Floridi's core claimis that a journal's irreducible contribution to scholarly communication is whathe calls the editorial signature: a named editor, embedded in a researchcommunity and backed by an institution, accepting personal accountability for apublished claim under conditions of genuine uncertainty. Registration,archiving, dissemination, and reward allocation all have dedicated institutionshandling them - arXiv, repositories, citation platforms, funding bodies.Certification of research findings, discoveries, and hypotheses is whatjournals do and what no other institution replicates in the same way. TheAI-born architecture is organised around exactly that observation: AI absorbsthe surrounding infrastructure, and the signature stays with the editor.

The component technologies for this design already exist inworking pilots at eLife, Octopus, aiXiv, and Manubot, each demonstrating adifferent piece of it. Floridi ends with a concrete proposal: to pilot theAI-born architecture at "Philosophy & Technology," theSpringer-Nature journal he edits, over the next twenty-four months, withresults reported in the journal itself.

At Cellformatica we spend our days helping researchersprepare their manuscripts for submission, so we do not need to squint at thehorizon to see this coming. The journals that move first will lead thistransition. The ones that wait will discover that waiting was itself adecision.

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[Floridi, "The editor's signature: a proposal forAI-born journals," SSRN 2025. Posted: 24 Apr 2026 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6642959]

The article is prepared by the head of Cellformatica content team