Position: We Need Greater Transparency to Maintain Research Pipeline Reliability Despite GenAI

This position paper argues that the research community must act to maintain research pipeline reliability despite increasing threats from GenAI. We start in the pre-GenAI era by highlighting some of the prominent critiques of the research pipeline, consisting of: (a) Authoring, (b) Reviewing, and (c) Evaluating researchers based on bibliometrics. Then, we discuss some of the effects GenAI has had on each research pipeline component based on the best available data, limited though it may be. Importantly, due to opaqueness of the submission pipeline, it is difficult to measure both the impact of GenAI and the efficacy of interventions, which leads us to call for greater transparency. Last, we conclude by offering three alternative views and ten paths forward that may mitigate some of the issues we highlight by keeping human researchers as the primary driver of science