News: Academic Publishing Weekly

The AI Scientist, WSU Press news, and libraries achieve digital title rights

Posted on August 16, 2024 in News

“The AI Scientist” and More AI Training News

AI developer Sakana AI has created “The AI Scientist” in partnership with researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia. VentureBeat’s Michael Nuñez explained that The AI Scientist is an open source AI system that can “conduct end-to-end scientific research autonomously” including performing experiments and peer review. Nuñez considered how the new model will impact humans’ roles in publishing and research funding. Next, Nature’s Elizabeth Gibney predicted that the ingestion of researchers’ work into large language models (LLMs) will continue to proliferate. Lucy Lu Wang, who researches AI at the University of Washington, underscored that work that “is available to read online — whether in an open-access repository or not — is ‘pretty likely’ to have been fed into an LLM already.” Gibney noted that several researchers are exploring methods to identify whether authors’ publications were used for AI training, but detection remains tricky. Gibney also acknowledged disagreements over copyright protections and underlined academics’ mixed willingness to train AI models on their content.

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Sustainable Publishing Pledge and Libraries Gain Digital Title Rights

The United Kingdom’s Publishers Association’s Publishing Declares agreement received its 200th signature. Publishing Declares seeks to “raise awareness of climate change and to emphasize the publishing industry’s role in helping combat the climate crisis through environmental sustainability initiatives.” Signatories commit to promoting climate literacy, working to become net zero, and employing sustainable processes. Turning to the library, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Independent Publishers Group (IPG) are partnering to provide librarians with “the power to purchase and own in perpetuity, rather than merely license, tens of thousands of ebook and audiobook titles from dozens of independent publishers.” The news follows several rejected court cases in recent years that sought to alter restrictive e-book licensing models.

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The Future of APS Press and Calculating AI Risk

As the 250-year-old American Philosophical Society Press (ASP Press) begins digitizing its backlist, Jon Repetti, a Fellow at the Press, provided a brief history of the publisher and themes reflected in its titles. In particular, Repetti highlighted ASP Press’s focus on “a spirit of liberal inquiry determined to follow the investigation wherever it may lead, born of a confidence that all genuine knowledge is, by definition, useful.” Repetti also detailed the Press’s aim to distribute its digital titles by the end of this year and plans to launch several book series. Repetti further stressed that humans can better deduce the ethos of a body of work than AI. Speaking of artificial intelligence, after conducting an analysis of AI risk frameworks and finding several blind spots, researchers at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and MIT FutureTech released an AI Risk Repository. As explained by MIT’s Peter Slattery, Rachel Gordon, and Neil Thompson, the AI Risk Repository is “a comprehensive and accessible living database of 700+ risks posed by AI.” The repository will be regularly updated and groups risks by cause, risk domain, and risk subdomain. Slattery, Gordon, and Thompson gave an overview of the categories, discussed which risks are addressed the most in current frameworks, and chronicled plans to further examine the work of AI developers.

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Penn State Libraries Publishes a Journal and WSU Press Update

In an update to the recent news of Washington State University’s decision to defund WSU Press, MyNorthWest reports that the Press will remain in operation under the WSU Libraries. MyNorthWest cited a statement from WSU’s Vice President of Marketing & Communications Phil Weiler, who shared that WSU Press received a “funding commitment” from WSU’s Provost’s Office and “the two remaining employees of the WSU Press will be retained beyond December 31.” Next up, Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing released a new Diamond OA journal, Geomorphica. Geomorphica is the sole Diamond OA journal in the field of geomorphology and will be led by a steering committee that has a “dedicated and expansive team of editors, contributors and volunteers, and is currently recruiting additional volunteer support.”

Trivedi Science Book Prize Shortlist and ALPSP Rising Stars

During the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Royal Society revealed the six-title shortlist for its Trivedi Science Book Prize. The list features works of “popular science writing” narrowed down from an initial 254 submissions. Gísli Pálsson’s The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction from Princeton University Press made the cut. The winner will be announced on October 24th. In other award news, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) named the recipients of this year’s ALPSP Rising Star Award. The award, open to ALPSP members, aims to “recognize potential in early-career individuals.” The five winners received free tickets to the ALPSP 2024 conference and will publish essays about their experiences. Publishing Perspectives commented on the all-women recipients, which include Ella Gibbs, a journals executive with Bristol University Press, and Heather Townsend, a sales and customer service coordinator with Bristol University Press.

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