Academic Publisher Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training
The international academic publishing company Taylor and Francis says “it is providing Microsoft non-exclusive access to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems”.
That “learning content and data” is your writing and research.
The statement from Taylor and Francis, published in an article at The Bookseller, follows the recent circulation on social media of details about an agreement between its parent company, Informa, and Microsoft.
The Bookseller reports:
Informa will be paid $10m+ for “an initial data access” of the works it has the rights to, with a recurring payment of an undisclosed sum to be made over the subsequent three years.
When contacted by The Bookseller, Taylor & Francis said 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”.
One of the biggest concerns… is over whether it is possible for Taylor & Francis’ authors to opt out of the AI partnership with Microsoft. [Ruth Alison] Clemens [whose work has been published by the firm] told The Bookseller: “There is no clarity from Taylor & Francis about whether an opt-out policy is in place or on the cards. But as they did not inform their authors about the deal in the first place, any opt-out policy is now not functional.”
The Bookseller asked Taylor & Francis if it was possible to opt out and requested clarification over whether authors had been told about the AI deal. The publisher’s spokesman said he couldn’t comment further.
Taylor and Francis publishes many philosophy journals.
I sort of feel like the techbros are trying to turn us all into Marxists? I mean, could there be a more classic case of exploitation in Marxian terms?
“But you signed the contract!”… as if any of us had much of a choice.
Time for those of us not on the market to commit to open-access-only publishing (and possibly refereeing). Enough.
Disgusting. The end of paywalled, for-profit academic publishing cannot come soon enough.
I’m not an expert in intellectual property and I don’t think legal doctrine on this is quite settled yet, but it’s worth noting that open access publications will—practically speaking if not legally speaking—be less protected from use in training sets. If people’s objection to this is grounded in an objection to their papers being used in training sets, the open access/for profit distinction is a red-herring.