Note: Claude told me that the tone of this post was dismissive of authors’ concerns. I suppose it is. But it’s not wrong.
Battersby, M. (2024). Academic authors “shocked” after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI. The Bookseller.
Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year… The Society of Authors said it is “concerned to see publishers signing deals with tech companies without consulting authors and creators first”.
I’m baffled that anyone is shocked about this.
- You signed over your intellectual property when your paper was accepted.
- Publishers have been gouging academics and universities for decades, becoming the most profitable companies in the world. This isn’t a new tactic for them.
The Society of Authors (SoA) urged authors who “find their work has been used without their consent” to contact them for guidance…
This is the core of the issue…it’s no longer ‘your work’. In general, publishing an academic paper means that you’re handing your IP over to the journal, for them to do with as they wish. The only way to avoid this is an overhaul of the entire academic publishing industry.
Also this…
“We are at a crossroads in the production and dissemination of research knowledge, and in my view the biggest problem with this deal is the reduction of academic research into raw content from which data can be extracted and repackaged as knowledge”
Taking data and repackaging it as knowledge sounds an awful lot like what we call ‘research’ when humans do it.