TRACE Project Launches to Advance AI interoperability
The community comes together to launch TRACE, a project to improve generative AI systems’ interoperability, verifiability and usage tracking.
Todd Carpenter is currently Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), where he helps to organize community consensus on a variety of technical and business practice issues for publishers, libraries, and systems vendors. He has served SSP as Secretary-Treasurer, a Board member, and a chair of several committees including Education and Web Editorial. He additionally serves in a number of leadership roles of a variety of organizations, including as Chair of the ISO Technical Subcommittee on Identification & Description (ISO TC46/SC9), founding partner of the Coalition for Seamless Access, Past President of FORCE11, Treasurer of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), and a Director of the Foundation of the Baltimore County Public Library.
After receiving his Bachelors degree in Philosophy and German from Syracuse University, Todd escaped the snowy northern climate for the warmth and sun in Georgia and then eventually Maryland. Realizing there was no lucrative future in philosophical musings or reading German literature, Todd entered publishing, where he worked in a variety of marketing management roles at the Haworth Press, the Energy Intelligence Group, the Johns Hopkins University Press, and BioOne. When not working on standards development, his wife and two children, gourmet cooking, running, biking, and photography engage almost all of his waking hours. Todd is a regular speaker at community events, and is also active on BlueSky @9thprime.bsky.social.
The community comes together to launch TRACE, a project to improve generative AI systems’ interoperability, verifiability and usage tracking.
For Peer Review Week 2026, we asked the Chefs two questions: What is one uncomfortable truth about peer review that the scholarly publishing community doesn’t talk about enough? And, beyond recruiting more reviewers, what conversation about peer review capacity are we overlooking?
The US Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in the copyright infringement litigation between The New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft, et. al., largely siding with the AI companies and strongly favoring the notion of LLM training as fair use. We asked the chefs for their thoughts.
Identifying AI content is now embedded in Claude models. It doesn’t solve the problem we have. It also creates others.
A Cambridge workshop proposes new standard work to support provenance, attribution and metrics in scholarly communications AI tools.
Building robust citation and attribution into generative AI systems are foundational to usage, credit and trust. We need to expect more from AI.
The Chefs offer their reflections on last week’s SSP Annual Meeting.
The new STM Trends 2030 was released, symbolizing a world full of opportunities but also with dangers lying just below the surface for scholarly publishing.
A new STM Association paper seeks to foster a discussion about how GenAI systems can reliably incorporate scholarly research.
Todd Carpenter looks back on the past quarter century of a digital revolution in scholarly publishing.
We asked the Chefs for their thoughts on two important court decisions on the legality of using copyrighted materials for AI training.
NISO issues a report on workshops looking to improve the efficiency of working with AI systems in scholarly publishing
The French Open Science Monitor Initiative shows a path toward improving recognition of data sharing and open science assessment.
Changes in Library of Congress leadership could have profound impacts on copyright and intellectual freedom.
The NIH has answered the lingering questions about the future of the Nelson Memo. Not only is it still in effect, it’s being accelerated by six months. We asked the Chefs for their thoughts.