Dear CIDP fellows and friends,
It has been a great honour to serve as Director of the Centre for International and Defence Policy over the last year. We celebrated our 50th anniversary, renewed our Advisory Board, and hosted a successful Kingston Consortium on International Security conference on maritime security, in addition to our ongoing business of research, publication, training and mentorship, workshop facilitating, network hosting, and much more. This year of internal changes took place against an external backdrop of global uncertainty, international conflict, and an unprecedented peacetime expansion of Canadian defence spending. These factors led to an increased interest in the work of the Centre across campus and beyond.
In order to make sure that the CIDP is positioned to support our research community and help shape international and defence policy in Canada, we undertook a survey of our fellows this winter and reviewed at peer institutions. Informed by our community, we are fine-tuning our practices and resource allocations to ensure that we are ready to meet the moment. Effective July 1, we are implementing a set of reforms to the Centre, largely in the area of our knowledge mobilization efforts.
Publication Review Reforms
We have been delighted to receive increased submission volume to CIDP publication streams, including Contact Report, the Policy Briefs series, the Research Reports series, and Martello Papers (especially edited collections). In order to build internal capacity to manage current and future submissions, we have appointed a Publications Review Committee that will support the Associate Director (Publications) in the editorial review of manuscripts. This committee includes academic and practitioner membership, reflecting our community and the audience for our outputs. We have also asked our fellows to be ready to contribute to the review of new submissions. These changes will help maintain the strength of the CIDP’s in-house publication series and enhance editorial capacity to meet increased publication interest.
Generative Artificial Intelligence in CIDP Publications
In light of the increased use and misuse of general artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in the context of academic publishing, we are also moving forward to clarify limits of use of GenAI in work published through our channels. We recognize that many scholars have found responsible ways to integrate language editing, artificial peer feedback, and similar uses. However, we also share broader concerns about offloading key tasks and especially the misrepresentation of generated material as novel and authentic contributions by the submitting author. Our publication mission as a Centre is to share work by our community, not the outputs of large language models. Effective July 1, authors will be required to declare any use of GenAI tools in the preparation of their manuscript. Flagrant GenAI policy violations (e.g., unedited presence of “GenAI signatures” such as hallucinated references or command-related text) will result in an immediate rejection of the submission with a one-year ban on publication with CIDP. This is a living policy which will continue to evolve alongside technological developments of GenAI systems.
Open Access and Formalizing Reuse Rights
We recognize that authors may choose to publish through our publication streams in order to make timely interventions in policy debates within the context of larger research projects. By formalizing author reuse rights for published materials, we are providing increased clarity to scholars and practitioners choosing to share their work through our channels. CIDP will allow texts published here to be used in subsequent works without charge (e.g., material from a CIDP policy brief being incorporated into an academic journal article or a research report feeding into a monograph). We will also begin applying Creative Commons CC-BY licences to our outputs, joining a global framework to support open access to knowledge while also ensuring continuity of credit for the author.
Changing Course on the CIDP Podcast
Effective immediately, the CIDP’s podcast will be taking an extended hiatus. On Defence and Security has taken a broad-scope approach, competing with larger and more established outlets in a crowded field covering international affairs, security and defence, and related topics. We are proud of our contributions and have provided a platform for interesting conversations; however, we do not have the capacity to compete in this space. Our podcast will shift from an ongoing broad-scope model towards a thematic season-based framework. CIDP fellows can present a season proposal to CIDP leadership (including the identified host or hosts, guests, and format). This will provide a more focused mission to the CIDP podcast: catalyzing new conversations through four- or five-episode bursts.
These four changes at CIDP will help build capacity where we need it, redirect resources where they can be most impactful, and align our processes with our support for quality scholarship. We are continuing to reflect on our fellows’ survey and refine our governance processes at CIDP, and I look forward to announcing future CIDP initiatives in the coming months.
Thank you all for your support of the Centre.
Michael
Michael P.A. Murphy, PhD - Director, Centre for International and Defence Policy, Queen’s University