Academic researchers around the world are reeling from news announced in May that Informa, the parent company of academic publisher Taylor & Francis, has signed a $10 million data-access agreement with Microsoft.
The AI partnership agreement gives Microsoft “nonexclusive access to Advanced Learning Content” across Taylor & Francis’s nearly 3,000 academic journals. After the initial access fee of $10 million, Informa said it would receive recurring payments for the next three years.
Scholars across the U.S. and Europe said the news took them by surprise and they’re worried about how their research will be republished and cited by the publisher’s AI tools.
“I was shocked, not that it had happened, but that no one had said anything to us at all,” said Lauren Barbeau, assistant director of learning and technology initiatives at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has also published a book with Routledge, an academic publisher owned by Taylor & Francis.
“I’ve come to terms with the fact, as an author who has published, that at some point my work is going to go into AI, whether that’s through an illegal copy published somewhere on the internet or some other means. I just didn’t expect it to be my publisher.” ...
The deal could also mean the potential loss of citations, which are valuable currency in a scholar’s career. “What we’ve seen of AI by and large is that it’s not very good at citing or articulating what came from where and why,” Lance Eaton, a higher education consultant who specializes in generative AI, said. “Here, the publisher is selling the content to an AI tool, which we don’t know how it’s going to be used, but we know they want the scholarly information. What happens to those ideas in that scholarship? How does it get used and how do people get credit for it?”
A news release from Informa said it’s considering such concerns, and the agreement “protects intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references.” ...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2024/07/29/taylor-francis-ai-deal-sets-worrying-precedent.
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