Stop wasting my time! AI Agents Infiltrate Scholarly Publishing

February 6, 2026

As the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Educational Integrity, I have witnessed (and become super frustrated with) threats to academic publishing and research integrity from Gen AI. Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to AI, but I have been clear in my research and writing that technology can be used in good and helpful ways or ways that are unethical and inappropriate. Recently, our editorial office received a manuscript with the file name ‘Blinded manuscript generated by artificial intelligence.’

My reaction was, “Are you kidding me?! Well, that’s bold!” Although the honesty of the title may be rarity, the submission itself is symptomatic of a burgeoning crisis in academic publishing: the rise of ‘AI slop.’ Since the proliferation of large language models (LLMs), we have seen a dramatic increase in submissions. Now, I’m pretty sure that a portion of the manuscripts we are receiving are written entirely by AI agents or bots, sending submissions on behalf of authors.

ChatGPT generated image. A puppet seated at a desk in an office, holding a printed document titled “Blinded manuscript generated by artificial intelligence.” The desk is covered with papers, a pair of glasses, a pen, and a coffee mug, with bookshelves and a bulletin board visible in the background.

As a journal editor, let me be clear: The volume of manuscripts you send out does not equate to the value to the readership. It is not that I oppose the use of AI carte blanche, but I do object to manuscripts prepared and sent by bots, with no human interaction in the process. If a manuscript does not bring value to our readers, it gets an immediate desk rejections, and for good reason.

The Problem with AI Slop in Research

Academic journals exist to advance the frontiers of human knowledge. A manuscript is expected to contribute new and original findings to scholarship and science. AI-generated papers, by their very nature, struggle to meet this requirement.

  • Lack of Empirical Depth: AI excels at synthesizing existing information but cannot conduct original fieldwork, clinical trials, or archival research. It mimics the structure of a study without performing the substance of it.
  • Axiological Misalignment: There is a gap between the automated generation of text and the values-driven process of human inquiry. Research requires a commitment to truth, ethics, and accountability, qualities a machine cannot possess.
  • The Echo Chamber Effect: These submissions often present fabricated or corrupted  citations or circular logic that offers little to no utility to the reader. They clutter the ecosystem without moving the needle on critical conversations.

Upholding the Integrity of the Record

Our editorial board remains committed to a rigorous peer-review process, but let’s be clear: the ‘publish or perish’ culture, now supercharged by Gen AI, is threatening to overwhelm the very systems meant to ensure quality.

If an academic paper submitted for publication does not offer an original contribution or if it lacks the human oversight necessary to guarantee its validity, it has no place in a scholarly journal. We in a postplagiarism era where the focus must shift from merely detecting copied text to evaluating the originality of thought and the integrity of the research process. Postplagiarism does not mean that we throw out academic and research integrity or that ‘anything goes’. We recognize that co-creation with GenAI may be normal for some writers today. But having an AI agent write and submit manuscripts on your behalf wastes everyone’s time.

To our contributors: scholarship is a human endeavor. We value your insights, your unique perspectives, and your rigorous labour. In the meantime, we will continue with our commitment to quality, and I expect that the journal’s rejection rate will continue to be high as we focus on papers that bring value to our readership.

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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ChatGPT is in classrooms. What now?

February 2, 2026

“What should we be assessing exactly?” This was a question one of our research participants asked when we interviewed them as part of our project on artificial intelligence and academic integrity, sponsored by a University of Calgary Teaching Grant.

In an article published in The Conversation, we provide highlights of the results from our interviews with 28 educators across Canada, as well as our analysis of 15 years of research that looked at how AI affects education. (Spoiler alert: AI is a double-edged sword for educators and there are no easy answers.)

Alt text: Screenshot of The Conversation website showing a blurred smartphone screen with the ChatGPT app icon. Overlaid headline reads, “ChatGPT is in classrooms. How should educators now assess student learning?”
Screenshot from The Conversation.

We emphasize that, “in a post-plagiarism context, we consider that humans and AI co-writing and co-creating does not automatically equate to plagiarism.” Check out the full article in The Conversation.

You can check out the scholarly paper that we published in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education that goes into more detail about the methods and findings of our interviews.

I’d like to give a shoutout to all the project team members who worked with us on various aspects of this research: Robert (Bob) Brennan (Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary), Jason Weins (Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary), Brenda McDermott (Student Accessibility Services, University of Calgary), Rahul Kumar (Faculty of Education, Brock University), Beatriz Moya (Instituto de Éticas Aplicadas, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and the student research assistants who helped along the way (who have now all successfully graduated and moved on to the next phase of their careers): Jonathan Lesage, Helen Pethrick, and Mawuli Tay.

Related posts:

What Should We Be Assessing in a World with AI? Insights from Higher Education Educators – https://drsaraheaton.com/2025/11/25/what-should-we-be-assessing-in-a-world-with-ai-insights-from-higher-education-educators/

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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Breaking Barriers: Academic Integrity and Neurodiversity

November 20, 2025

When we talk about academic integrity in universities, we often focus on preventing plagiarism and cheating. But what if our very approach to enforcing these standards is unintentionally creating barriers for some of our most vulnerable students?

My recent research explores how current academic integrity policies and practices can negatively affect neurodivergent students—those with conditions like ADHD, dyslexia, Autism, and other learning differences. Our existing systems, structures, and policies can further marginalize students with cognitive differences.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All

Neurodivergent students face unique challenges that can be misunderstood or ignored. A dyslexic student who struggles with citation formatting isn’t necessarily being dishonest. They may be dealing with cognitive processing differences that make these tasks genuinely difficult. A student with ADHD who has trouble managing deadlines and tracking sources is not necessarily lazy or unethical. They may be navigating executive function challenges that affect time management and organization. Yet our policies frequently treat these struggles as potential misconduct rather than as differences that deserve support.

Yet our policies frequently treat these struggles as potential misconduct rather than as differences that deserve support.

The Technology Paradox for Neurodivergent Students

Technology presents a particularly thorny paradox. On one hand, AI tools such as ChatGPT and text-to-speech software can be academic lifelines for neurodivergent students, helping them organize thoughts, overcome writer’s block, and express ideas more clearly. These tools can genuinely level the playing field.

On the other hand, the same technologies designed to catch cheating—especially AI detection software—appear to disproportionately flag neurodivergent students’ work. Autistic students or those with ADHD may be at higher risk of false positives from these detection tools, potentially facing misconduct accusations even when they have done their own work. This creates an impossible situation: the tools that help are the same ones that might get students in trouble.

Moving Toward Epistemic Plurality

So what’s the solution? Epistemic plurality, or recognizing that there are multiple valid ways of knowing and expressing knowledge. Rather than demanding everyone demonstrate learning in the exact same way, we should design assessments that allow for different cognitive styles and approaches.

This means:

  • Rethinking assessment design to offer multiple ways for students to demonstrate knowledge
  • Moving away from surveillance technologies like remote proctoring that create anxiety and accessibility barriers
  • Building trust rather than suspicion into our academic cultures
  • Recognizing accommodations as equity, not as “sanctioned cheating”
  • Designing universally, so accessibility is built in from the start rather than added as an afterthought

What This Means for the Future

In the postplagiarism era, where AI and technology are seamlessly integrated into education, we move beyond viewing academic integrity purely as rule-compliance. Instead, we focus on authentic and meaningful learning and ethical engagement with knowledge.

This does not mean abandoning standards. It means recognizing that diverse minds may meet those standards through different pathways. A student who uses AI to help structure an essay outline isn’t necessarily cheating. They may be using assistive technology in much the same way another student might use spell-check or a calculator.

Call to Action

My review of existing research showed something troubling: we have remarkably little data about how neurodivergent students experience academic integrity policies. The studies that exist are small, limited to English-speaking countries, and often overlook the voices of neurodivergent individuals themselves.

We need larger-scale research, global perspectives, and most importantly, we need neurodivergent students to be co-researchers and co-authors in work about them. “Nothing about us without us” is not just a slogan, but a call to action for creating inclusive academic environments.

Key Messages

Academic integrity should support learning, not create additional barriers for students who already face challenges. By reimagining our approaches through a lens of neurodiversity and inclusion, we can create educational environments where all students can thrive while maintaining academic standards.

Academic integrity includes and extends beyond student conduct; it means that everyone in the learning system acts with integrity to support student learning. Ultimately, there can be no integrity without equity.

Read the whole article here:
Eaton, S. E. (2025). Neurodiversity and academic integrity: Toward epistemic plurality in a postplagiarism era. Teaching in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2583456

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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A Brief History of Postplagiarism: Or, Why Fabrication is Not the New Flattery

October 13, 2025
Infographic titled "Postplagiarism: A Brief History" by Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, showing a timeline from 2021 to 2025 that highlights key milestones in the development of the concept of postplagiarism. 2021: Eaton introduces postplagiarism in her book Plagiarism in Higher Education, building on Rebecca Moore Howard’s work. 2023: Eaton explicitly defines postplagiarism in an article published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity. 2024: Eaton and Kumar launch www.postplagiarism.com, offering multilingual translations and open-access content. 2025: Rahul Kumar publishes the first empirical study on postplagiarism in the same journal, analyzing student reactions.

I am always excited to hear about new work that showcases postplagiarism. Imagine my dismay when I read a new article, published in an (allegedly) peer-reviewed journal, that foregrounded the tenets of postplagiarism, but was rife with fabricated sources, including references to work attributed to me, but that I never wrote.

I have opted not to ‘name and shame’ the authors. Anyone who is curious enough need only do an Internet search to find the offending article and those who wrote it.

Instead, I prefer to take a more productive approach. Here I provide a brief timeline of the development of postplagiarism as both a framework and a theory:

2021: Plagiarism in Higher Education: Tackling Tough Topics in Academic Integrity

The book begins with a history of plagiarism. Then, I discuss plagiarism in modern times. In the concluding chapter I contemplate the future of plagiarism. Building on the scholarship of Rebecca Moore Howard, I proposed that  the age of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) could launch us into a post-plagiarism era in which human-AI hybrid writing becomes the norm.

2023: Expanding on the ideas first presented in the final chapter of my book, I wrote my first article dedicated to the topic: “Postplagiarism: Transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology”, published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity.

2024: Dr. Rahul Kumar (Brock University, Canada) and I launch our website, http://www.postplagiarism.com. We provide open access resources free of charge. Thanks to the generosity of colleagues and friends who speak multipole language, we offer translations of the postplagiarism infographic in multiple languages.

Also, in this year, Rahul Kumar begins a study to test the tenets of postplagiarism.

2025: Rahul Kumar publishes the results of the first empirical article on the tenets of postplagiarism. His article, “Understanding PSE students’ reactions to the postplagiarism concept: a quantitative analysis” is published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity.

If you see references to our work on postplagiairsm as we have conceptualized it that pre-date our work, dig deeper to see if the work is real. There are now fabricated sources published on the Internet that do not — and never did — exist.

Imitation is flattery, as the saying goes. This quip has been used as a way to dismiss plagiarism concerns, as students learn to imitate great writers by quoting them without attribution. The saying digs deep into cultural and historical understandings that are beyond the scope of a blog post. What I can say is that in the postplagiarism era, fabrication is not the new flattery.

One of the tenets of postplagiarism is that humans can relinquish control over what they write to an AI, but we do not relinquish responsibility. The irony of seeing fabricated references about postplagiarism in fabricated is as absurd as it is puzzling. There is no need to fabricate references to post plagiarism, especially since we provide numerous free and open access to resources and research on the topic.

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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Decriminalizing the Language of Academic Integrity

October 2, 2025

The first time I heard about decriminalizing the language and processes we use to address cases of plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct; I was riveted. It was at an academic integrity conference in Richmond, Virginia and the lead presenter was Dr. James Earl Orr, who presented together with students on how a developmental and supportive approach to academic misconduct case management can help lead students towards academic success while still holding them responsible for their behaviour.  James Earl Orr, writing together with Karita Orr, published an excellent article on using restorative practices to resolve academic integrity violations.

When I was writing the University of Calgary’s academic integrity Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants, I took the opportunity to apply what I had learned from listening to Dr. Orr at conferences and reading his work by including a section on how to decriminalize the language we use to talk about academic misconduct.

Academic integrity violations are rarely criminal in nature and yet, much of the language we use when addressing plagiarism and academic cheating is legalistic, setting the stage for criminalizing student behaviour. One step towards taking a more learner-centred approach to misconduct is to decriminalize the language we use to talk about breaches of academic integrity.

Front cover: Student Academic Integrity Faculty Handbook
Front cover of the Student Academic Integrity Faculty Handbook, published by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary

The following is an excerpt from the University of Calgary’s academic integrity Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants that provides practical guidance on how to do this:

“We know that words matter and the language we use is important. A full list of terms related to academic misconduct is available in our policy. It should be noted that the terms “academic integrity” and “academic misconduct” are not interchangeable.

Academic integrity is about acting ethically in teaching, learning and research contexts. We do not report, investigate or manage cases of academic integrity. We report, investigate and manage cases of academic misconduct.

Academic misconduct is what happens when individuals do not act with integrity. This is currently the language used in our policy and procedures. When speaking and writing about academic misconduct, we can use the terms “breaches of integrity or “violations of integrity” as synonyms for academic misconduct.

At the University of Calgary we take a proactive approach to academic integrity, including in the language we use and in keeping the focus on teaching, learning and fairness to students. In our conversations with students and others, it can be helpful to use the language of integrity that focuses on education and support” (Eaton, 2022, p. 13).

See the table below, which is also an expert from our handbook (with a few minor updates):

The language of academic integrity

Preferred
language		Language
to avoid 		Explanation
Hold responsible Guilt
Guilty
The words “guilt” and “guilty” do not appear anywhere in our
polices or procedures. We do not find students guilty of academic misconduct, but instead we hold them responsible for their
behaviours.
Sanctions
Consequence
Outcome		Punish
Punishment
When disciplinary actions are taken in response to academic
misconduct, we do not use the terms “punish” or “punishment”
in our institutional documents. We opt instead for “sanctions”,
“discipline,” “consequences” or “outcome” which can include educational responses depending on the misconduct.
Hearing Trial 
The University of Calgary does not conduct trials related to
academic misconduct.
In other countries, various forms of academic misconduct can be
considered an offense under the criminal code and students may
be required to attend a criminal trial. That is not the case at the
University of Calgary or anywhere in Canada.
In the case of an appeal, a hearing might occur. In rare cases, an appeal case might escalate to an externally reviewed case in court, but these proceedings are not administered by the university itself.

When I talk about taking a postplagiarism approach to academic integrity I am talking about disrupting historically adversarial and antagonistic approaches to misconduct that pit students against their teachers. It is time to move past crime-and-punishment approaches to student misconduct where students are the villains and teachers are the heroes. When we talk about postplagiarism we talk about social justice and student success as being intertwined, and we focus on students as stewards of the future, who will be best equipped for an increasingly complex world when they understand the importance of ethical decision-making, both in theory and in practice.

Postplagiarism does not mean anything goes, and nor does it mean that we turn a blind eye to misconduct. Postplagiarism is about finding socially just ways to address misconduct include relationally, restoration, and the preservation of dignity and human rights. When we decriminalize language related to student misconduct, we are taking a step towards dignity and   student success.

Our University of Calgary’s academic integrity Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants is an open access handbook with a Creative Commons license. This means you can share and adapt the material, providing the original work is properly attributed.

If this is helpful to you, please share this with others.

References and Further Reading

Eaton, S. E. (2022). Student Academic Integrity: A Handbook for Academic Staff and Teaching Assistants. University of Calgary, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning Guide Series. https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/resources/student-academic-integrity-handbook

Eaton, S. E. (2023). Postplagiarism: Transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 19(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00144-1

Eaton, S. E. (2025). Global Trends in Education: Artificial Intelligence, Postplagiarism, and Future-focused Learning for 2025 and Beyond – 2024–2025 Werklund Distinguished Research Lecture. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 21(1), 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-025-00187-6

Orr, J. E., & Hall, J. (2018). Student-led case adjudication: Promoting student learning through peer-to-peer engagement. 25th Annual International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) Conference, Richmond, VA.

Orr, J. E., & Orr, K. (2023). Restoring honor and integrity through integrating restorative practices in academic integrity with student leaders. Journal of Academic Ethics, 21, 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-021-09437-x

Orr, J. E., & Orren, S. (2018, March 4). The Development & Implementation of a Campus Academic Integrity Education Program. 25th Annual International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) Conference, Richmond, VA.

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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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