News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Publishers' AI policies, predatory conferences, and falling US-China research partnerships

Posted on July 26, 2024 in News

An Analysis of Publishers’ AI Policies and Reactions to Taylor & Francis’s AI Deal

According to Avi Staiman of The Scholarly Kitchen, publishers need to step up their game when it comes to AI policies for authors. In particular, Staiman warned against the frequent one-size-fits-all approach utilized by publishers, stressing the importance of differentiating between “substantive” and “non-substantive” AI use. Staiman provided several recommendations including creating a standard set of living guidelines and determining “whether authors can act as content generators, reviewers, or both.” Next up, The Bookseller reports that authors published by Taylor & Francis were not notified about the publisher’s recent AI deal with Microsoft that provides access to their research. Authors noted that they cannot opt out of the deal and weren’t given additional compensation. In response, Taylor & Francis claimed that it is “protecting the integrity of our authors’ work and limits on verbatim text reproduction, as well as authors’ rights to receive royalty payments in accordance with their author contracts.”

---

---

What Is a Predatory Conference?

Although some academics may be aware of predatory journals, it appears that another form of suspicious behavior is on the scene—predatory conferences. A Nature reporter recently joined one such conference, finding that numerous presentations failed to occur, sessions were often off-topic, and no one from the organizing company was in attendance. Nature explains that predatory conferences function to generate profit and researchers may attend due to the potential to add to their CVs. As James McCrostie, a researcher at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo, underscored, “The problem is there’s not enough speaking spaces at these legitimate conferences, so scholars that need to present … and can’t get in at the famous conference will go to the predatory conference.” Nature further addressed the impact of predatory conferences on research reliability and how the pandemic contributed to their increase. [Nature]

---

OUP’s Latest Annual Report and a Big Ten Academic Alliance Pilot

Oxford University Press (OUP) released its Annual Report for 2023/24, providing an update on its trading revenues and yearly turnover. The report detailed growth in OUP’s academic and education divisions, citing positive engagement with the Oxford English Hub and English Language Teaching Online Conference. The report also covered changes to the Oxford English Dictionary website and found that “revenue from digital content and services now account for 70% of the [academic] division’s turnover.” In other news, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project are partnering to “create a unified discovery layer for the diverse publishing platforms of participating libraries, presenting them as a single, shared collection of open access materials.” BTAA detailed how the libraries of Penn State University, Indiana University, and the University of Iowa plan to contribute to the pilot project and shared that the initiative is part of an effort to support infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing.

---

---

Research Overseas: Declining China-US Collaborations and a Look at OA in Africa

Similar to results from Clarivate’s 2024 G20 Scorecard, an analysis from Springer Nature shows that the number of research collaborations between China and the United States is falling. Springer Nature’s team in China revealed that although China’s international partnerships are decreasing as a whole, U.S. collaborations “fell by 6.4% between its peak in 2017 and 2023 — the largest decline of any country included in the analysis.” Marina Zhang, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, addressed the impact of the United States Department of Justice’s 2018-2022 China Initiative and warned that decreasing international collaborations could shift research away from global challenges. Turning to Africa, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) published survey results on the state of Diamond OA journals under the “Collaboration for sustainable open access publishing in Africa” project. Along with several country reports, the study includes information on the “editorial quality of African Diamond OA journals and their peer review workflows, technical services efficiency, and visibility and discoverability.”

---

New Hong Kong Open Book Project and ACLS Opens Submissions for OA Awards

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, and University of Hong Kong are partnering on Hong Kong’s first open access books initiative, Open Books Hong Kong. Last week, the project published nine Chinese-language humanities and social sciences titles in time for the Hong Kong Book Fair. The program’s coordinators noted that Open Books Hong Kong “not only showcases the research published by Hong Kong’s three university presses but also addresses what they see as a significant gap in open-access resources for Chinese-language monographs.” As for book awards, the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award are open for nominations. The awards will be given to authors and publishers of open access humanities monographs published between 2018 and 2023. Categories include Environmental Humanities, History, Literary Studies, and Multimodal works. American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) shared that submissions will close in early September, and publishers “are invited to nominate up to three books in each of the four categories.”

---

Related Posts