ADAPT: AI-Driven Decentralized Adaptive Publishing Testbed

TL;DR

ADAPT is an agent-based, AI-driven testbed that models scholarly publishing as a decentralized, adaptive control system to improve management, transparency, and resilience under various operational stresses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized, agent-based framework for scholarly publishing that incorporates adaptive governance and feedback mechanisms, unlike traditional centralized systems.

Findings

ADAPT maintains manageable backlog and reviewer load under simulated stress.

The system exhibits bounded, interpretable responses during operational perturbations.

ADAPT effectively mitigates collusion and adapts to quality drift in simulations.

Abstract

Scholarly publishing faces increasingly strong stressors, including submission overload, reviewer fatigue, inconsistent evaluation, governance opacity, and vulnerability to manipulation in old and new forms. While recent studies applied artificial intelligence to improve specific steps (e.g., triage, reviewer recommendation, or automated critique), they typically work under centralized editorial control and offer limited mechanisms for system-level adaptivity and auditability. Here we present ADAPT (AI-Driven Decentralized Adaptive Publishing Testbed), an agent-based environment that models journal management as a closed-loop control system rather than a fixed editorial workflow. ADAPT integrates interacting agents in various pools (authors, reviewers -- human and AI -- and rotating editors) coupled through policy-level control and diverse feedback signals. Governance adapts to backlog pressure, reviewer disagreement, paper quality drifting, and other relevant factors, while keeping human decision authority, role non-permanence, and data confidentiality. We evaluate ADAPT in a discrete-time simulation setting across multiple operational regimes, including baseline operation, submission surges, quality drift, disagreement escalation, post-publication learning, and collusion suppression. Across regimes, we quantify backlog dynamics, reviewer load, coordination activity, and management performance. The results indicate that ADAPT works under nominal and perturbed conditions, exhibits bounded and interpretable responses under stress, and mitigates clusters with embedded interventions. This feasibility demonstration suggests a promising direction of academic publishing practice, and can be extended to real-world implementations in suitable scenarios.