INTRODUCTION 302

I. HOW ARE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS REACTING TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? 306
A. Sample and Sample Size 307
B. Scholarly Publisher AI Policies 309
C. Organizations Advancing Excellence in Publishing Ethics: the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) 320
D. Ever-evolving Scholarly Publishing AI Policies 329

II. MAJOR THEMES IN SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS AI POLICIES 330
A. Author Accountability, Disclosure, and Transparency in the Shadow of AI Hallucinations 330
B. The Use of Private AI Tools vs. Public AI Tools 337
C. Unintended Rights Transfers with AI Platforms 339
D. Copyright, Authorship, and AI 341
1. What Does Authorship Mean? 341
2. The Need to Be Human 342
E. Emerging Developments 344
1. The Use of AI in Peer Review 344
2. The Use of AI for Translations 345

III. THE IDEAL AI POLICY FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS 346

CONCLUSION 347

APPENDIX: PUBLISHER AI POLICIES 349
A. Oxford University Press (“Author use of Artificial Intelligence”) 350
B. IEEE (“Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Text”) 353
C. Frontiers (“Artificial intelligence: fair use and disclosure policy”) 354
D. Taylor & Francis (“AI Policy”) 356
E. De Gruyter Brill (“AI-Policy for Authors”) 359

Artificial intelligence (AI) is challenging ethical norms in scholarly publishing. How are academic publishers responding to new, complex ethical issues raised by this advanced technology? This article untangles this question by reviewing the AI policies of five major academic publishers to determine trends and considerations in defining authorship, accepting AI-assisted works for publication, reusing published scholarly works and preprints in AI platforms for purposes related to peer review and translation, establishing guidelines for originality, disclosure, and transparency, weighing the use of private vs. public AI platforms, and flagging unintended rights transfers.