From Compliance to Praxis: Distributed Ethics in GAI‐Mediated Scholarly Publishing

ABSTRACT The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) into scholarly publishing has intensified debates concerning authorship, integrity, transparency and accountability. Prevailing governance approaches address these concerns primarily through disclosure requirements, acceptable‐use policies and other compliance mechanisms that locate responsibility in individual scholars. This conceptual paper argues that such approaches provide an incomplete account of ethical responsibility because scholarly communication is constituted through relations among human actors, institutions, technologies, evaluative infrastructures and political‐economic structures. Drawing on sociocultural theory, distributed cognition, the extended‐mind thesis, cognitive extension, and scholarship in the field of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP), the paper advances distributed ethics as an interpretive perspective on GAI‐mediated publishing. It applies this perspective to four interconnected domains: authorship and intellectual labour; scholarly voice, linguistic legitimacy, and epistemic conformity; algorithmic governance and evaluative legitimacy and the political economy of scholarly communication. The analysis argues that GAI can broaden access to linguistic and editorial support, particularly for scholars using English as an additional language, while simultaneously reinforcing dominant discourse norms, opaque evaluative systems, commercial dependencies, and existing inequalities in scholarly visibility and participation. The paper consequently reframes ethics as scholarly praxis: an ongoing process through which the entire scholarly community collectively negotiate, steward, and, where necessary, transform the conditions of knowledge production. It concludes that ethical governance must extend beyond individual compliance towards coordinated responsibility for sustaining diverse, accountable, and institutionally autonomous systems of scholarly communication.