News: Academic Publishing Weekly

New AI licensing tracker, an analysis of Plan S, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction shortlist

Posted on October 18, 2024 in News

“Wiley AI Partnerships” and Ithaka S+R to Track AI Licensing Agreements

Wiley continues to make moves in the AI market with the release of Wiley AI Partnerships: A Co-Innovation Program. As explained by Wiley, the program “aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency and accuracy of scientific discovery.” The publisher is currently looking for new partners and will begin collaborating with the AI research assistant, Potato, this month. Next up, Ithaka S+R’s Roger Schonfeld, Maya Dayan, and Dylan Ruediger unveiled a tracker for publishers’ AI licensing deals. In a piece for The Scholarly Kitchen, Schonfeld provided an overview of the tracker’s development, sharing that “thus far there doesn’t appear to have emerged a standard set of terms or overall model from which to build these deals.” Schonfeld also pondered publishers’ motivations for licensing authors’ content to AI developers.

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Evaluating cOAlition S’s Plan S

This week cOAlition S released an independent report from Scidecode Science Consulting that analyzes the impact of Plan S on the growth of OA publications. Science’s Jeffrey Brainard highlighted key findings from the study, which includes both quantitative and qualitative measurements. Of note, the report found that Plan S mandates spurred growth in OA output from hybrid journals but “it could take 5 to 10 more years to obtain solid evidence showing whether its policies are helping accomplish the funders’ goals to make the large majority of scientific articles immediately free to read when published.” The qualitative analysis is more promising, with Brainard underlining positive comments from publishers and librarians. Brainard further acknowledged that Johan Rooryck, executive director of Coalition S, plans to continue to revise Plan S, focus on diamond OA, and include “incentives and assistance for researchers to make many other products of their scholarly activities, such as peer-review reports they write, publicly accessible.”

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Adoption of GenAI by Researchers is “Mixed”

A new study from Ithaka S+R and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative finds that biomedical researchers remain skeptical over generative AI. In particular, the study reveals that despite more than 60 percent of researchers utilizing the technology, “most use it sparingly or no longer use it at all.” Study participants reported a lack of trust in AI’s outputs and highlighted a desire for more “support from funders, publishers, and universities to develop their skills using generative AI in their research.” The full research report covers attitudes toward AI, “barriers to adoption,” and a survey breakdown fact sheet. For those looking for more AI news, Ithaka S+R will be releasing a report on its generative AI cohort project at the end of the year. Ithaka S+R also shared that its researcher survey project will commence next year and revealed plans for a project on AI literacy. [Ithaka S+R]

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The Open Kentucky Open Access Initiative and Springer Nature Retraction Trouble

The University Press of Kentucky (KY Press) and University of Kentucky Libraries have announced the Open Kentucky Open Access Initiative. Sponsoring the release of two OA titles from KY Press per year, the program’s first title will be published in January. Doug Way, dean of libraries, spoke on the agreement, sharing, “I am thrilled that the University of Kentucky Libraries is able to expand our collaboration with the press to help make more of the tremendous Kentucky and Appalachian scholarship available to people across the Commonwealth and around the world.” In other news, Retraction Watch reports that Springer Nature “has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse” for its journal Optical and Quantum Electronics. Retraction Watch mentions that the retraction notices cite Springer’s identification of issues with the papers’ peer review and references. Problems with the journal date back to February, when computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac discovered the use of tortured phrases in “nearly 50 articles.” Retraction Watch also acknowledges recent retractions from Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research, which had its Journal Impact Factor (JIF) removed by Clarivate earlier this year.

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KnowledgeWorks and Taylor & Francis Partner with DataSeer

It’s a good week for DataSeer, a provider of AI solutions for scholarly communication and open science compliance. First, Taylor & Francis (T&F) is partnering with DataSeer on two pilot projects centered on supporting open science. The first project will analyze several of T&F’s journal data sharing policies to “determine how well the automation functions as compared to existing manual editorial checklists.” The second project will assess 5,000 T&F articles using DataSeer’s Open Science Metrics. Taylor & Francis emphasized that the “open science business intelligence will illuminate trends, identifying areas of strength and opportunities for growth.” Next, educational publishing solutions provider KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) also announced a collaboration with DataSeer. The partnership will “embed automated checks for data sharing best practices into KGL’s Smart Review tool” by integrating DataSeer’s SnapShot into the platform. KGL underscored that the agreement “both expedites the peer review process for journal stakeholders and enhances the quality, transparency, and reliability of published research.”

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Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist, University of Michigan Press Distribution Update, and UP Reads for Fall

The shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction was recently announced at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. Comprised of six titles, the list includes works from the 2014 Booker Prize for Fiction winner Richard Flanagan and the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen. The winner will be announced on November 19 and jury chair Isabel Hilton commented that, “It is a shortlist that we celebrate as a testament to the power of nonfiction to enlighten, engage and inspire us.” Next up, Liverpool University Press (LUP) will begin distributing titles for the University of Michigan Press (UMP) as part of Liverpool Distribution Services. LUP will be UMP’s “exclusive distribution partner for the UK and Europe and non-exclusive partner for the rest of the world outside of the Americas.” Lastly, the New Statesman spotlighted 15 academic titles to curl up with this autumn. The books touch on several hot topics, with highlights including AI Morality, edited by David Edmonds from Oxford University Press, and Campus Free Speech by Cass R. Sunstein from Harvard University Press.

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