Why Authors Aren’t Disclosing AI Use and What Publishers Should (Not) Do About It
Only a negligible percentage of authors seem to actually be disclosing their AI use. Here’s why I think that’s the case.
Guest Post — Who Controls Knowledge in the Age of AI? Part 2, Recommendations for Stakeholders
The MIT Press surveyed book authors on attitudes towards LLM training practices. In Part 2 of this 2 part post, we discuss recommendations for stakeholders to avoid unintended harms and preserve core scientific and academic values.
Guest Post: Finding Your Voice in a Ventriloquist’s World – AI and Writing
What are prompts in our writing tools asking us if we want to “rewrite with AI” really telling us? And what would broad adoption of those tools mean for creativity and scholarly research communication?
A Dissonance of Ideals: Openness, Copyright, and AI
Robert Harington attempts to reveal inherent conflicts in our drive to be as open as possible, authors’ need to understand their rights, and a library’s mandate to provide their patrons with the enhanced discovery that comes with AI’s large language models (LLMs).
Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – Susan King
Robert Harington talks to Dr. Susan King of Rockefeller University Press (RUP), in this series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and for-profit sectors of our industry.
Chef de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – Amy Brand
Robert Harington talks to Dr. Amy Brand of MIT Press, in this series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and for-profit sectors of our industry.
The Publishing Community Should More Actively Oppose Book Bans
With a lawsuit filed last week Pen America, Penguin Random House, authors, and parents began fighting book bans. Other publishers should help.
Guest Post – GPT-3 Wrote an Entire Paper on Itself. Should Publishers be Concerned?
Saikiran Chandha discusses the impact of GPT-3 and related models on research, the potential question marks, and the steps that scholarly publishers can take to protect their interests.
Revisiting: Will the Future of Scholarly Communication Be Pluralistic and Democratic, or Monocultural and Authoritarian?
Rick Anderson revisits a 2020 post: One way or another, the #scholcomm community is going to choose either a diversity of publishing models or a monoculture, because it can’t have both. How will this choice be made, and by whom?
Q: Can You Revoke a Creative Commons License? A: No. Er… Sort Of? Maybe?
A Creative Commons license is irrevocable; it says so right in the license. But it also says you can change your mind and distribute the work differently, or not at all. What does this mean?
Fraud and Peer Review: An Interview with Melinda Baldwin
Robert Harington and Melinda Baldwin discuss whether peer review has a role to play in uncovering scientific fraud.
The Cell Press Inclusion and Diversity Statement — An Interview with Deborah Sweet
Deborah Sweet of Cell Press discusses their recently introduced Inclusion and Diversity Statement in this interview with Alice Meadows
Why You Should Care about Open Access: An Open Letter to Scholarly and Scientific Authors
If you’re a scholarly and scientific author and you think the open access movement is irrelevant to your interests, think again.
One Author’s Novel Approach to Article Self-Publishing: An Interview with Allyson Mower
An author found that the relevant journals were unwilling to publish an article of historical research that found evidence for a surprising and somewhat controversial proposition about the founding of the University of Utah. So what did she decide to do with her article? Something rather unusual, it turns out.
Is Copyright Piracy Morally Wrong or Merely Illegal? The Malum Prohibitum/Malum in Se Conundrum
Is copyright infringement malum prohibitum (wrong only because it’s prohibited) or malum in se (morally wrong in and of itself)? Interestingly, scholcomm commentators and legal reference materials often characterize it as the former–while both statute and case law treat it like the latter, classifying it as “property theft” and regularly awarding its victims both statutory and punitive damages.