The traditional academic mantra, long-standing in academia for the past 100 years or so, has been Publish or Perish. Today, that has emerged as a trend of submitting as many papers as possible, initially targeting the (perceived) top journals in the field, and cascading down the journal ranking ladder until eventually accepted, often many years after initial submission. This strategy could be termed Spray and Pray. GenAI is likely to exacerbate this problem, as authors can use it to create papers pretty much instantaneously. AI can be prompted to generate synthetic data, analyse that data, write the paper draft to suit a particular outlet, and even provide a review of the paper. One negative result of this Spray and Pray strategy is the load this places on the reviewing system. Hence it can be seen as a curse for academic publishing. However, given the high and possibly arbitrary peer-review rejection rates in many outlets, it makes sense to submit as many papers as possible. Research grants allow researchers to create large research groups, and hence increase the volume of research output. Also, advances in technology have greatly facilitated global collaboration by allowing researchers to work effectively without being physically co-located. GenAI can support many aspects of paper writing, and level the playing field for those for whom English is not the first language. In this sense, it can be seen as a cure for academic publishing.

Brian Fitzgerald was a founding Principal Investigator in Lero–the Irish Software Research Centre in 2005, and subsequently held the roles of Director and Chief Scientist at Lero. He holds an endowed professorship, the Krehbiel Chair in Innovation in Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, where he also served as Vice President Research.

He holds a PhD from the University of London and his research interests lie primarily in software development, encompassing open source, inner source, crowdsourcing, agile and continuous software development. His publications include 17 books, and over 200 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international journals and conferences in both the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields.

In 2020, he was elected President of the Association for Information Systems, the global body for Information Systems worldwide, and in 2024 he was awarded the LEO Award for outstanding lifetime contribution to the IS discipline.

He is also General Chair for the premier conferences in both disciplines, the 37th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), 2016, and the 49th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), to be held in Dublin in 2027.

His research projects have received over €115m in peer-reviewed funding.

Prior to taking up an academic position, he worked as a software developer for about 12 years, working in Ireland, Belgium and Germany