It’s not often you publish two books in two weeks! I recently also released a book about civics and citizenship education – but this is a book with a difference. Here’s an extract from the introduction:
As I intimated above, this book is different to other sole author or edited books. The reason for that is that this book has come about through a collaboration between machine learning tools and my own work as an expert in the field. My role has been
something of a cross between an editor and a co-author.
After an initial consultation with Springer, I developed a proposal for the book, and provided the publisher with a list of suitable chapter headings for the vision of the book that I had in mind. Based on the topics that I provided, the machine learning
tools and algorithms identified almost 100 possible articles that could be included in the book and were aligned to the various topics I had selected. It is crucial to note that these articles could only be selected from the Springer repositories. This is an
important consideration in relation to copyright and intellectual property, but it does mean that the book is limited in some respects: I would have liked to have included more articles of my own—but I hadn’t published them with Springer! Nevertheless,
Springer is one of the largest academic publishers in the world, so there was a wide range of possible articles to choose from.
From that point, I then worked with the Springer team to decide which of the articles were most suitable, and which were not relevant. Once the machine-generated summaries had been created, I reviewed them against each individual included article
to ensure they provided an accurate summary so that they could be included. Even at this point, some articles were removed from the book; the summary and my own reading meant that they were no longer relevant for this book. In this way, I acted almost like an editor of a special issue or collection.
On a final note: according to the most recent decisions, generative artificial intelligence tools cannot be authors for works that they’ve had a part in developing. Therefore, the responsibility of authorship is something that I assume, along with responsibilities for any errors that have arisen in the creation process of the book.
Read more here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-97-5134-1