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Academics shocked after T&F sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
- j_crick 2y agosurprised_pikachu.jpg
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWe need regulations that enforce positive consent. Otherwise, this will keep happening.
- nequo 2y agoWe need to eliminate the rent seeking behavior of academic publishers. They do not fund the research, do not fund the peer review of the research, but pocket huge profit margins by charging others[1] for access to it. Edit: [1] By others, I mean our university libraries and any poor soul who does not have membership in one. Today, universities pay to access their own research.
- pdonis 2y agoWe need to eliminate the publishers period. Publishing on the Internet is free.
- chefandy 2y agoPublishers do a lot more than print things out. I'm not saying that what they do is good, but "let's just put it on the internet" doesn't replace publishers any more than rideshares replace long-haul trucking.
- impendia 2y agoWhat, exactly, is this "a lot more"? I am an academic who publishes regularly, and I'm having difficulty figuring this out. They clearly employ lots of bureaucrats, middle managers, and lawyers. They are constantly trying to make sketchy side deals with third parties, as T&F did. They employ copyeditors, who in theory (and sometimes in practice) improve papers but who very often are totally incompetent. They maintain large databases of something-or-other, presumably so they can sell out my data. They maintain complicated systems to submit and review papers, when it seems that email would suffice, presumably so they can track all this metadata they want to sell. Oh! And they lobby the government for their own selfish ends: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europe https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j... Seriously. Imagine all of them up and vanished tomorrow. Would anybody miss them?
- richardw 2y agoThey’re branding experts. Getting published by Nature is far more valuable to someone compared to (all the other options). Humans prize exclusivity. We’ll hand our time and resources to people who can give us a tiny bit of it. The harder we have to work, the better. A fancy watch. A low production supercar you can’t buy unless you have 5 of the same marque already. All the same broken stupid pattern.
- chefandy 2y agoAgain, I didn't say that what they do is the right way to do it, but what about discoverability? Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world? If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way, what's to prevent the entire channel from being taken over with spam? Is it done entirely by URL, and what's to stop the cited content from changing? What if they lose their domain? Is the similar domain that pops up with similar content the same author or someone that just ripped the site and is going to start serving up ads as soon as everyone switches their URIs? Or maybe we'd have libraries go out and actively retrieve this stuff rather than passively accepting it-- Would they monitor... mailing lists? What if someone posts a timely and incredibly controversial paper that lists a respected authority that just died as its author? What's to stop an author that published a bullshit paper from passively claiming it was a forgery? Would you, currently, give equal weight to citations published in the New England Journal of Medicine and a google doc with a bunch of citations to other google docs and personal websites? If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers? Beyond that, current URL citations are a fucking mess. Link rot is a huge problem and most of the people that make citations in papers have no idea how to mitigate it. Discoverability, relatively stable hosting, and the most base-level vetting and credibility are problems that they address, even if they do so poorly and greedily. If they went away tomorrow, so would the databases of work they manage, the APIs libraries use to query them, their mechanisms to confirm that whoever said they published something actually published it... Publishers don't have to be the answer-- I think a lot of these problems could be resolved through field organizations, librarianship and university organizations, but what's the likelihood that of universities and field organizations will try to monetize it and essentially become publishers in all of the worst ways?
- pdonis 2y agoIf what they do isn't good, why would we want them to keep doing it?
- malshe 2y agoAs an academician I wholeheartedly support this. Some journals are now charging thousands of dollars to make our work open-access. This is an industry run by sociopaths.
- constantcrying 2y agoPublicly funded science shouldn't be "published" by some corporation, it should go directly into the public domain. Having a totally artificial middleman makes no sense when basically all publishing happens digitally. And the public deserves full access to the science they have funded.
- MaxBarraclough 2y agoThat would be the (oddly named) green open access model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Colour_naming_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Colour_naming_syst...
- carbocation 2y agoThe only thing I'm 'shocked' by is the idea that anyone needs to pay to access my academic writing for model training. I would hope that using my academic writing to train models would be considered fair use.
- BenFranklin100 2y agoMy thoughts exactly. See my comment below. The whole purpose of being an academic is to publish and disseminate knowledge.
- akira2501 2y agoToo bad there isn't a GPL for science. You can use my work, but if you incorporate it into a for profit work, you may be required to provide the results of your _continued research_ back to the public. I mean.. if dissemination of knowledge _truly_ is the end goal here.. and not just giving a free corporate lunch out because the job market is the broken and dysfunctional.
- BenFranklin100 2y agoAbsolutely not. I want my work to be used in any way that is possible, including by for-profit enterprises. If I required companies to provide results back to the public domain, most wouldn’t touch my work and it would have less impact. And you are confused. The immediate goal/purpose of academic work is to create knowledge. I said nothing about the underlying purpose of this goal. The ultimate purpose of this goal is to provide the foundation for a better society, which includes the knowledge being used to build better technologies, products, and processes by for profit companies. The antipathy towards profit is one of the many great contradictions of the Left. They will willingly make the public worse off in order to prevent a private profit.
- akira2501 2y ago> And you are confused. You literally said "The whole purpose of being an academic is to publish and disseminate knowledge." You are now saying this means something different than it's apparent reading? > which includes the knowledge being used to build better technologies, products, and processes by for profit companies. Why then do you think these entities are entitled to the output of academics without paying for it, or as a compromise, contributing back to the pool of global knowledge in kind? What I'm getting at is the way you and the GP have framed this position is that you might then consider it wrong for an academic to charge for access to their work or for themselves to start a business and profit from it. That seems off to me. > The antipathy towards profit is one of the many great contradictions of the Left. This is an oversimplification of an easily understood nuance. For profit companies are obviously fine but we might also want a measure to determine if any one entity is contributing more to society than it is extracting from it. In lieu of this perhaps forcing companies to contribute back to the same body of public knowledge that they obviously benefit from is not some great contradictory injustice. > They will willingly make the public worse off in order to prevent a private profit. Since business have no natural right to exist we, as people, have every right to exclude some of them from operating or even existing at all. Is my aversion to slavery actually a disguised antipathy towards profit?
- kalfHTA 2y agoThis is a rotten thing to do by Taylor & Francis. Humans are treated as expendable pawns to serve the capital and the machine. We need new publishing models with strict copyright protections that protect against theft. Academics should run their own publishing houses as a cooperative.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- freeone3000 2y agoThe entire purpose of academic publishing is to widely distribute knowledge. The co-op would break doen the absolutely awful publishing fees to be sure, but… I’m not sure what “theft” you feel took place here.
- ladfgym 2y agoAnd the distributors need to be rich mega-corporations who collect a fee for selling you back your own works?
- nostrebored 2y agoThey're not selling you back your works, they're selling you back a distillation of them. Hopefully one that's useful for a particular context.
- johnnyanmac 2y agogreat, my favorite aspect of society. Paying to get someone or something else's interpretation of raw knowledge that is barred from the public , privy to all their biases and in a black box resistant to peer review. Yeah, this is definitely going to change the world. I'm not sure if it'll be for the better.
- SoftTalker 2y agoWho pays for the peer review? Who prevents the publication of nonsense, pseudo-science, cherry-picked findings, etc. Granted you may argue that is done poorly today but it certainly doesn't happen for no costs.
- winddude 2y agoAren't they also one of the academic publishers that's been criticized for charging for access to articles, and the authors don't get anything from the publication/distribution?
- wsay 2y agoThis is pretty much a standard model in academic publishing
- winddude 2y agoTrue, and unfortunate, other than arxiv, and openreview
- kkylin 2y agoExcept for open access models where someone -- usually the authors, but sometimes universities or other institutions -- pay so that the article can be accessed by the public for free. (Authors usually don't pay out of pocket but using grants, and OA journals usually offer some sort of "financial aid" for those unable to pay.)
- xp84 2y agoWhat a waste of money to pay these parasites to let the public see your research. It’s just as much a waste of grant money too. Whether that comes from or from a nonprofit, padding the pockets of some publishing company gatekeeper is in no way what anyone should expect their money to go toward.
- shusaku 2y agoIt’s a little hard to tell from the article, but I think this is about books not research articles, and that the authors have some amount of revenue sharing.
- xyst 2y agoWhich is why I have never paid for an academic article from a publisher. I have been e-mailing authors directly for access to the article and have been successful most of the time. Maybe once or twice, the e-mails go unanswered. In one case, the primary author had died (a subsequent search linked a news article showing a skiing accident). In another case, the author had simply moved to a different university thus the e-mail in the paper was outdated.
- BenFranklin100 2y agoI’m kind of ok with this? I’ve written and had book chapters and research articles published. I never thought I was in any sort of position to restrict access. Publishing is about getting it out there. Attribution might be an issue, but that is a separate conversation and perhaps dealt with, if possible, by having LLM’s cite sources more accurately. I have not kept up with the latest on LLM’s and licensing, but I’m curious: are scientific papers accessible to LLMs? Honestly, a bigger societal loss in my view is publishers like Elsevier restricting LLM access to research articles, rather than being too permissive. I could not care less if Elsevier makes a little bit of money in the process.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>Attribution might be an issue, but that is a separate conversation and perhaps dealt with, if possible, by having LLM’s cite sources more accurately. hand-waving it by "oh just have corporations promise they will cite their sources, honor system" is the easiest way to not have corporations cite their sources. Plus if these corporations are so gun-ho about how "we don't store your data in an LLM", that wouldn't be a trivial matter anyway. >a bigger societal loss in my view is publishers like Elsevier restricting LLM access to research articles, rather than being too permissive. it's only a bigger loss if you think the knowledge will be proportionally handed down to society. Which it rarely is.
- JSDevOps 2y agoIf no one is going to learn from academic papers/data what’s the point in doing it? People care less and less about the impact more about how much money it’ll make them. If that’s all you want from it then be honest but don’t complain when someone makes more money from something than you.
- ladfgym 2y agoThe point of academic papers is that HUMANS learn from it. The point is not that machines generate a mashup that masquerades as a probability distribution and companies sell that mashup together with ads (the latest predictable development). I see no indication that the affected academics are concerned with the money that their papers make them. Most want to give them away for free to HUMANS.
- nostrebored 2y agoExcellent. More humans will have access to academic paper information in a form that's useful to them now :)
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIn this age of mass misinformation and astroturfing, I guess it would be more "useful" to them now. No one seems to care about the truth these days.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoThe reality is that AI publishers (NeurIPS, ACL, related) all do proper academic publishing norms, and they are now forcing the rest of the world to follow them or have their content laundered in the form of LLMs trained on it. Good.
- andrewstuart 2y agoHas anyone made a marketplace to sell data to AI and at the same time explicitly exclude data from being accessed by AI?
- xyst 2y agosomething like this already exists. they are called "data brokers"
- asdasdsddd 2y agoDoes publish mean something else in this context? I thought publishing means that anyone can have access to your research.
- DonsDiscountGas 2y agoAnybody willing to pay for it, yes. Typically tens of dollars per article or thousands/year for a subscription. It's not like scientists get any of that money though, it's just one more case of publishers squeezing scientists.
- astromaniak 2y agoIs there a legal way to bypass those collectors. It should be, right. After all most research is done on public money.
- trogdor 2y agoEmail the author of the paper and ask for a copy. My success rate with that method is 100%. “Greetings, I am interested in reading your paper, “[title of paper],” but I have only been able to find paywalled versions. Would you please send me a copy? Thank you, trogdor”
- klyrs 2y agoBack in the day, this was the way to get really nice print copies by mail, and a handwritten letter by the author.
- bell-cot 2y agoThink "publish" in the 1940's magazine sense - which is pretty much the distribution model for all "traditional" academic journals. If Famous_Author publishes an article in The Saturday Evening Post - maybe you're a subscriber to The Saturday Evening Post. Or you head to a brick-and-mortar library which subscribes, to read the article there. Or you pay Cover_Price, in cash, to a news stand or drug store or whatever, to get your dead-tree copy of the issue in question.
- perihelions 2y agoInformation should be free. We subsidize scientific research to the tune of trillions of dollars—not to support to livelihood of grad students; not to create jobs in the publishing industry; but on the theory the fruit of that research has planet-wide benefits. We throw money hand-over-fist at scientific research because we view that as investing in civilization. If we believe that, and we believe research progress builds on top of other research, then the conclusion is we ought to minimize the friction of discovering other groups' research results, and maximize their availability. Make the act of research as easy and painless as possible. Scientific research output should be free, universally, without hindrance. It's myopic to try extract wealth from this public good by siloing it, by toll-gating access to it. Like barricading a public highway with toll-booths every 500 meters: it's a myopia that's blind to the public-good value of infrastructure—a myopia of greed that's a universal drain on public wealth, for some petty local optimization. If you obstruct ML models on some financial profit theory, you're obstructing not only the ML entities; you're obstructing the thousand researchers downstream who stand to benefit from them. You're standing the in road blocking traffic, collecting tolls; you've not only stopped the vehicle in front of you, you've stopped a thousand more stranded behind it. It is a public nuisance.
- kldrt 2y agoThat's kind of orthogonal to the issue here. Many academics would not mind if their research is free. They do mind very much if some entity takes their research and republishes it without attribution.
- lolinder 2y agoWhy is that orthogonal? If their research is truly free then everyone has permission to republish it all the time. If it was done with public funds then it belongs in the public domain, and if it's in the public domain then everyone can do everything they want with it. If they're not comfortable with that, then they aren't comfortable with their research being free-as-in-freedom.
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
- BeetleB 2y agoFinally! We've solved the problem of having to pay $30/article to get access. We'll just query the LLM!
- bionhoward 2y agocan’t use that to develop AI, it’s against the terms of use
- Terretta 2y agoWhy is a researcher called a creator in this article? Are they not a fact discoverer or truth revealer? It's unclear to me researchers should “own” truths prior research and public patronage enabled them to unearth. // note: research != invention, i.e., Space X experimenting until systems and machinery can land a rocket on a barge is not “research”, but testing and documenting characteristics of fuels in a vacuum as the environment swings from -100C to 120C is
- poincaredisk 2y ago>Space X experimenting until they can land a rocket on a barge is not “research Why? What else could it be if not research?
- sam_bristow 2y agoThe usual pairing is research and _development_ isn't it.
- Terretta 2y ago> what else could it be if not research? it could be experimentation and learning about your own invented system and mechanic, not uncovering of existing truths the word "search" makes this more clear, the answers research finds already exist, we just didn't find them yet. that is not the case for inventions that don't work, and need to be experimented with until they work. there may, certainly, be some incidental research discovery while attempting to make an invention work (e.g. if Space X had hit on something new about physics itself that had been causing their prior experiments to fail) -- but nobody "owns" such truth discovered, while of course they own their invention that works as a result of applying known truths to a creation.
- svnt 2y agoI’m not sure why you’re being downvoted, it is a valid and important point. Researchers discover empirical structure. They don’t create it. It isn’t art. The article seems to want to bring rights holders together in a way that isn’t valid. A scientific paper is normative. Its construction is closer to a pull request than artwork.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoThe whole academic publishing system is rotten to its core. Rent seekers living off the labour of underpaid academics and selling the product back to them, all while tax-payer money props up the racket.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoPretty disappointed by the responses here, but I suppose I can't be surprised in a community sympathetic to AI and abhorrent to copyright as a concept. Those are both topics that can be a post in and of itself, so I'll just keep it simple and emphasize once again that we should implement the 3C's when asking of anything from another person's IP. I doubt many of the older papers/articles had contracts that allowed for such usage. Reinforced by the article: >The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company. regardless of your position, this publishing group at worst lied and at best is being irresponsible, this isn't even an issue of AI or copyright. We can debate "well this is how it should be", but let's leave ShouldLand for a bit and actually look at the current situation. Trust being broken in real time.