AI opens a new era in publishing

After publishing two books using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Springer Nature has published a third ai-generated book, CRISPR: A Computer-generated Literature Review. This is a literature review of CRISPR(Regularly spaced clusters of Short palindromic repeats) gene editing. The editors of the new book are Zhang Ziheng, PhD student of the School of Life Science and Technology, Wang Ping, subject librarian of the Library and Information Center, and Liu Jilong, professor of the School of Life Science and Technology, all from Shanghai University of Science and Technology. This is the first time that Springer Nature uses AI to extract literature in the field of life science to generate books, and it is also the first time that Chinese scholars participate in the experiment of AI-generated books.

As we all know, CRISPR and its related technologies have been an important research hotspot in recent years, with an explosion of research results, with Springer Natural alone publishing more than 53,000 related papers as of June this year. Therefore, researchers are faced with the challenge of how to quickly understand and master the latest scientific progress in this field from a large number of literature. Springer Nature's practice of applying AI to academic publishing offers a solution to these challenges.Springer Nature published the first fully AI-generated book on lithium-ion batteries in 2019, titled lithium Ion Batteries: A Summary of Current Research generated by Computers. Springer Nature, in collaboration with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and others, developed an algorithm that automatically wrote a book on the latest advances in lithium-ion battery research. The content of the book is no different from that of a traditional book, including a preface, table of contents and bibliography, but it is 100 percent automatically generated by AI, and the staff did not change a single punctuation mark. This book summarizes the latest research progress in the rapidly developing field of lithium ion batteries. It contains automatic cross-corpus summaries of a large number of existing research papers in this field, which can help researchers effectively deal with the problem of information overload in this field. It's actually the first computer-generated science book and has the potential to open a "new era in scientific publishing," said Henning Schoenberg, springer Nature Book publishing solutions director.

Then, in 2021, Springer Nature published another AI-generated literature review, Climate, Planetary and Evolutionary Science: A Computer-generated Literature Review, using a hybrid human-computer interaction approach. Unlike previous books on lithium-ion batteries, which were entirely AI-generated, the new book takes an innovative hybrid approach to human-computer interaction. The new book combines human-written texts with computer-generated literature reviews from a large number of previously published articles in Springer Nature journals, which the authors then put into the book's chapters and provide scientific perspectives. This is the first book to be published in this way.CRISPR: A Computer-generated Literature Review was automatically generated by Springer Nature's latest AI platform. The chief editor's team searched the journal papers published by Springer Nature in recent years according to the self-determined keywords, and then selected 114 papers from the search results based on the domain knowledge atlas calculation and the chief editor's theoretical framework. After reading the full text of these papers, the AI platform automatically generates summaries. Finally, the chief editor team classified and sorted the abstracts into 6 chapters, and wrote the introduction of each chapter manually for the convenience of readers.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research progress in the field of CRISPR, providing a useful reference for graduate students interested in the research of CRISPR and related technologies, as well as researchers in the initial stage of research.

Liu Jilong, one of the book's editors, says: "CRISPR, like lithium-ion battery research, has seen a large number of papers emerge in recent years, making it a good fit to use AI to generate literature reviews more quickly and efficiently. I am thrilled to be part of Springer Nature's experimental project and to see how AI can unleash its great potential in book creation and knowledge dissemination. "We believe that the ai-based automatic document summarization system will further promote scientific progress and make a revolutionary contribution to the dissemination of human knowledge in the near future."

Dr. Enping Tang, President of Springer Nature Greater China and President of the global Book business, said, "This new book is another excellent example of human-computer interaction generating books. We are very happy to have Chinese authors involved. We are currently using the AI platform to help more authors generate book content, and we believe readers will see more of these books in the future. "We are also exploring the practice of ai-generated chapters of books, while other chapters are still written by humans."

In the four months since the book went online, there have been more than 2,700 visits (including online reading and downloading of e-books), with an average of more than 400 visits per chapter.