Policies and Opportunities with Volume 6 of the GRAPHIC MEDICINE REVIEW Journal
Posted by A. David Lewis on 2026-05-31
With the launch of voume 6, the editors of the Graphic Medicine Review (GMR) wanted to take a moment to address three related topics and policies that we are overtly putting in place for the journal.
The first returns to two of our 2025 posts concerning AI. Currently, GMR remains closed to any submissions generated by or using generative AI. We especially want to urge authors and creators submitting work to review their sources and scrutinize them, as well, in terms of stated policies on Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine leaning. None of this is intended to take an adversarial nor condeming posture to AI and to those who utilize it, but we cannot yet ethically support its incorporation until further oversight has been standardized across academia, publishing, and the comics industry. It is, in short, a defensive measure.
To that end, GMR is adopting the EPICS standards expressed by A. David Lewis at the 2026 Health Humanities Consortium (HHC) Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana and excerpted on his Substack page. We expect that additional and revised details on EPICS are forthcoming, and we welcome affiliated organizations like the Graphic Medicine International Collective (GMIC) and the HHC itself also to explore these AI protocols.
The specifics on how to implement and best apply EPICS to GMR will be one of the upcoming tasks for our Editorial Team later this year. One such implementation may be the use of University of Chicago's SAND Lab programs Glaze and Nightshade to guard against images on the GMR site being scraped for unauthorized AI learning. Further, we will be looking to offer the Editorial Team additional training in the Janeway platform itself, in copyediting, in layout, and in typesetting, as well as launching some of their own GMR initiatives (e.g. conference proceedings, translations, etc.).
Finally, in accordance with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II and Title III, we will be maintaining PDFs of all GMR publications going forward, with appropriate and robust metadata, while suspending redundant HTML versions. This is intended to keep our scholarship aligned with WCAG 2.1 AA practices while also eliminating outdated processes. Again, the Editorial Team will help in determining whether this minor shift is both practical and effective.
Notably, we are also inviting inquiries from motivated students and young scholars seeking internships who might aid in our tagging and inputting of such alternative text. Recommendations and inquiries should be sent to the editors, please.