Spotlight on: The Forest of Biologists

The judges have selected a shortlist of three for the ALPSP Impact Award 2024. This year's awards are sponsored by PA EDitorial.

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference on 11 September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September in Manchester.

In this series, we hear from each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community. The Company publishes five specialist peer-reviewed journals: Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open. It offers further support to the biological community by facilitating scientific meetings, hosting three community sites, providing travel grants for researchers and supporting research societies.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

The Forest of Biologists is a project that we are very passionate about and we are thrilled it has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Impact Award 2024. It aligns with the concerns of biologists worldwide about climate change and biodiversity loss, with a clear focus on biodiversity.

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

We plant a tree for each article published in our journals and help to protect areas of ancient woodland on behalf of our peer reviewers (in partnership with the Woodland Trust). The idea was that with each publication we make one tiny contribution to improving biodiversity – and by adding up each of these tiny impacts, we can achieve something substantial in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. We also built a game-inspired website through which our communities could view virtual representations of their trees (and learn more about the real-life trees) and track our progress.

The seed for this idea was planted by Steven Kelly, Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of Biology Open at the time. In the process of development that followed, we included internal and external stakeholders, including Directors and a group of early-career researchers who all gave valuable feedback throughout, making sure that the final product aligned with the needs of our audience. In-house, many staff have been enthusiastic contributors and as the Publisher, I have championed the project (and visited each woodland site to check on our trees). 

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

Like many other publishers we care deeply about the environment, and sustainability is a key consideration in many things we do. We feel we have made a significant commitment to biopositive publishing by embedding our actions into our core publishing activities and ensuring that our trees are responsibly planted with longevity in mind. In addition to the environmental impact of planting and protecting trees, we hope to make a significant contribution to counteracting biodiversity loss by creating new woodland habitats and helping to protect the unique biodiversity in ancient woodlands. We’re delighted that our initiative also has an educational element, emphasising the importance of trees and woodlands in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss with the young people involved. We hope The Forest of Biologists provides an encouraging example of biopositive publishing that others may choose to emulate as we consider the effects of our activities on the environment. 

What are your plans for the future?

We have seen an overwhelmingly positive response to the initiative, from authors, readers, reviewers and librarians, which makes us even more excited to consider our next steps. We have already started discussions with the Woodland Trust on options for the future and, for now, we will almost certainly continue to focus on trees and woodland. But after that, we might well consider expanding into other areas or ecosystems.

About the author

Claire Moulton is the Publisher at The Company of Biologists, where she is responsible for the company’s journal and digital content strategy. 

Previously, Claire worked for Elsevier, where she was responsible for the Current Opinion and Trends journals. She has a background in molecular and developmental biology. 

More information

The Forest of Biologists.

The Company of Biologists.

Spotlight on: Research Organization Registry (ROR)

The judges have selected a shortlist of four for the 2024 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. This year's awards are sponsored by PA EDitorial.

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference on 11 September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September in Manchester.

In this series, we hear from each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

Fun fact: ROR itself is not an organization! It is an initiative jointly operated by California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite – three organizations with deep ties to the publishing, research, infrastructure, and library communities that represent ROR’s key stakeholder constituencies. The three operating organizations share the responsibilities of resourcing and governing ROR per a multi-year Memorandum of Agreement first executed in 2020. As an initiative that first emerged through a series of meetings and collaborations beginning in 2016, ROR is committed to incorporating and addressing the input and needs of its global user base. Our operations and activities aim to be transparent and participatory. We hold open community meetings every other month to discuss plans and share progress, actively solicit feedback on product development decisions, and post about our processes publicly on GitHub and other channels so that everyone can see and contribute to what we are working on.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

We submitted our proposal for the ROR registry, which encompasses the dataset itself (unique persistent identifiers and associated metadata for research and funding organizations), an accompanying suite of tools for querying, integrating, and matching ROR data, and a comprehensive and responsive process for curating registry data and releasing regular updates. 

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

ROR addresses a complex problem with a simple solution. Before ROR, there was no free, open, and reliable way to identify and connect the institutions that employ and fund researchers to the works those researchers produce. Some identification solutions did (and still) exist, but these were proprietary services that only certain users could afford, not fully open for global usage by humans and machines and interoperability across systems, or not tailored to specific research and publishing use cases. The niche that ROR fills is to provide a single, well-scoped, open dataset that can be used in any system to normalize and exchange information about institutions and make it easy and more efficient to identify and track research activities at the institutional level. Data is publicly available for anyone to query and integrate, and we release new registry updates every month so integrators can grab the latest additions and changes. We actively add new records and modify existing ones to ensure registry data is comprehensive and up to date, and to provide as much metadata as possible to support discovery and disambiguation. There is no cost to submit updates to the registry, and no cost to use the data. Integrators build organization lookups and other implementations to normalize institutional names in their systems, and they can provide ROR IDs to metadata sources like Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, which enables more precise reporting and tracking of research outputs in the downstream systems that rely on these metadata sources. 

As for the people behind ROR: we are a small and nimble team based across ROR’s three operating organizations, which means that in addition to supporting day-to-day work on ROR, we support and are connected to the activities and wider communities that our organizations are engaged with. There is more to ROR than the team, however: we are also fortunate to have an active and engaged network of supporters and advisors who provide important guidance and input on our development work, metadata curation processes, and strategic directions. 

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

ROR is not the first or only organization identifier, but it is unique and innovative because it is the only one that is completely free and open, specifically designed for research workflows and research infrastructure, uniquely suited to address a range of use cases, recommended in national persistent identifier strategies, and developed as a community-driven initiative. It’s a single, streamlined, and powerful service that can help make everyone’s metadata cleaner and more connected. 

What are your plans for the future?

This is an exciting time for ROR’s growth as we are seeing greater adoption in systems and services around the world to address a range of use cases. We continue to actively maintain registry data for quality and completeness as more and more users depend on it, and we are investing in scaling our workflows and infrastructure to support increased demand - the API, for instance, regularly sees 20 million requests every month. With rising adoption as well as growing interest overall in greater metadata connectivity through persistent identifiers, we are seeing an increased role for ROR to play in helping to manage, clean up, and connect massive volumes of legacy data, so we’re fine-tuning our API to leverage machine-learning technologies in support of large-scale matching and reconciliation. With the forthcoming deprecation of Crossref’s Open Funder Registry, we’re also completing our work to map Funder IDs to ROR and continuing to engage with funders and other stakeholders to support them through this transition. 

Example record from search UI:

Example ROR-powered typeahead lookup for affiliation and funding information:

About the author

ROR Director Maria Gould has led the initiative since 2018. She is also Director of Product at DataCite.  

More information

Research Organization Registry (ROR).

Spotlight on: Signals

The judges have selected a shortlist of four for the 2024 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. This year's awards are sponsored by PA EDitorial.

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference on 11 September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September in Manchester.

In this series, we hear from each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

Signals is a London-based startup, launched in December 2023, on a mission to restore trust in research. We are a team of former researchers with a deep interest in scholarly publishing and research integrity, and a proven track record of building products for publishers and researchers. Signals is already helping publishers to identify problematic articles at submission and in their portfolios. 

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

Signals addresses the pressing need of tackling publishing integrity issues that are eroding trust in research. These issues are difficult to detect at scale, but Signals aims to help solve this problem by providing researchers and publishers with the information they need to understand the trustworthiness and value of research articles. Our product analyses published articles, manuscripts, and entire journals, to help publishers and researchers improve their research integrity workflows and make rapid, informed decisions on articles they are working with. 

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Signals evaluates research articles by surfacing signals from the complex networks of articles, authors, institutions, and citations, combined with signals from experts, including sleuths and researchers. 

The Signals team has deep expertise in the scholarly publishing industry. Co-founders Andrew Preston, Elliott Lumb, and Tiago Barros bring extensive experience in building products for publishers and researchers from their previous roles at Publons, PeerRef, Faculty Opinions, and Sciwheel. Lead Engineer, Florin Asăvoaie, was the Solutions Architect for Hindawi’s Phenom platform. His engineering expertise and experience in the industry are accelerating Signals’ development. Nicko Goncharoff, our Commercial Lead, has over two decades of commercial experience in STM research software and publishing. Finally, Christos Petrou, with his expertise in scholarly publishing analytics, provides Signals with invaluable contributions on developing and refining our signals.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

Signals has a unique and innovative strategy to restore trust in research, based on these key pillars:

• Positioning: Signals is built for the entire research community. Research integrity doesn’t just affect publishers. It affects researchers, institutions, and anyone engaging with research. To restore trust in research it’s essential that everyone has access to the information they need to evaluate research.
• Network: Signals has a novel approach to evaluating research articles. By using a combination of insight from the networks of article metadata and contributions from experts, our data graph improves over time as the scholarly record grows and articles are cited and engaged with. Using this approach, our product currently flags 89% of known problematic articles.
• Transparency: Signals evaluations are transparent and actionable. We show why articles are potentially problematic and provide the necessary context to understand the basis of the evaluation. This enables individuals to make rapid and informed decisions on articles and simultaneously recognize and report false positives, enabling us to constantly improve Signals’ accuracy. 
• Trust: Signals doesn’t just flag potential issues, it also show why articles are trustworthy. This enables individuals to spend less time evaluating every article for potential issues, improving workflows.

What are your plans for the future?

We’re focused on addressing the urgent challenges faced by publishers. In the near future, we plan to extend our offering to research institutions, helping them to play a decisive role in identifying and preventing research fraud. There is a clear need to expand the use of Signals across the research ecosystem, to provide article-level insight for anyone engaging with research, including pharmaceutical companies, government, and healthcare professionals. Our goal is to amplify trustworthy, valuable research that advances our knowledge and supports progress. 

About the author

Elliott Lumb, Co-Founder, Signals.

Elliott is a Co-Founder of Signals. He has a PhD in medicinal chemistry, had several roles at Frontiers, consulted for publishers on their Open Access portfolio, and was the founder of PeerRef. 

More information

Signals.

Spotlight on: The Papermill Alarm

The judges have selected a shortlist of four for the 2024 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. This year's awards are sponsored by PA EDitorial.

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference on 11 September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September in Manchester.

In this series, we hear from each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

We love working with data, but we prefer working with you. Clear Skies was founded to support publishers. We believe that a robust, healthy peer-review system is critical to the future of research integrity. Our services are designed to support the challenging work publishers do to maintain that system while limiting the risk presented by research fraud. 

This is not a "move fast and break things" startup. We believe strongly in responsible science and ethical methods. We move with care and we respect that, behind every paper (real or fake) there are real people whose careers depend on fair consideration. For that reason, we present our findings in context and use an evidence-based approach to surface actionable information. We also avoid surfacing information that might be misleading or harmful. Much like an editorial process - the value comes as much from what we don't put out as from what we do.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

The Papermill Alarm

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

The Papermill Alarm is the name we give to the alerting system that sits on top of our analytics.

That gives us an early-warning system which is available as an API through a direct agreement, or via our partners at STM, Morressier, and others (to be announced). 

Sitting underneath that simple output, we have several pipelines of advanced analytics which feed into our dashboard Web Application. The dashboard surfaces important leads for investigation. What you don't see are the 50 or so different methods for detecting problematic papers that we tested and discarded. We retain only the few methods that provide genuine predictive power. Those methods include advanced AI textual analysis and network analysis. 

The system improves perpetually as new data comes in from publishers. It is self-improving and self-correcting. At this stage, the underlying data is a completely unique resource describing the papermill problem in detail across the whole industry.

The Papermill Alarm was created, built, tested, and deployed at industry-scale by Adam Day. However, around 20 individuals have contributed to Clear Skies and we have built a specialised core team over the last couple of years. We give particular thanks to Adrian Stanley whose support has been incredible. 

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

It was the first of its kind. The Papermill Alarm came to market in 2022 before there was any automated service dedicated to papermill detection. It's easy to see that this kind of scalable method is possible now, but at the time it wasn't clear and it took considerable testing and iteration to get there. From that initial market of 1, it has inspired numerous others to create their own papermill-detection services. 

What are your plans for the future?

The future is collaboration. We want to develop our team and work with everyone throughout the research community: first, to shine a light on the problem, but secondly to help tackle it as a team with an informed perspective.

Indeed, currently, we are developing our team to reach the next level. Stay tuned!

Image caption: a semantic space showing Papermill Alarm alerts for a publisher. Each dot is a paper. Red and orange regions represent areas of concern.  

About the author

Adam Day is the CEO of Clear Skies. He has a background in physics, machine-learning, journals-editorial and data science. He writes a popular blog about research integrity.

More information

Clear Skies.

 

Spotlight on: Morressier's Integrity Manager

The judges have selected a shortlist of four for the 2024 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. This year's awards are sponsored by PA EDitorial.

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference on 11 September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September in Manchester.

In this series, we hear from each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

Morressier provides publishers and societies with workflows for transforming scholarly communications. We empower you through the entire publication journey, from the first spark of an idea right through to journal submission and peer-review. We offer integrity-protected workflows across the following products: Proceedings Manager, Integrity Manager, and Journal Manager. Driven by the belief that technology can help create a world in which all scientific outputs are traceable and trustworthy, Morressier is headquartered in Berlin and has offices in London and Washington DC.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

Morressier’s Integrity Manager, launched in May 2023, addresses the integrity crisis in scholarly publishing with a comprehensive platform designed for detecting research fraud and managing investigations. By integrating both proprietary technology and top third-party tools, Integrity Manager effectively identifies a wide-range of issues, including plagiarism, citation misconduct, AI-generated text, image manipulation, and institution verification. This unified approach eliminates the need for publishers and societies to negotiate with multiple vendors and upload documents to various systems.

Additionally, the platform centralizes integrity investigation management, enabling users to track and analyze all investigation activities and data in one place. Integrity Manager reduces manual workload, lowers costs, and provides actionable insights through detailed reporting. By boosting trust in the scientific record and supporting early fraud detection, the platform streamlines editorial workflows, ensures high-quality publications, and minimizes costly retractions.

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

Morressier’s Integrity Manager performs a wide-range of sophisticated checks on manuscripts to ensure research integrity and streamline the editorial process. Here’s how it works:

Types of Checks

• Plagiarism Detection: Uses advanced algorithms to compare manuscripts against an extensive database of previously published works to identify potential plagiarism or paraphrasing.
• Citation Misconduct: Flags excessive self-citations or unusual citation patterns that may indicate inappropriate citation practices.
• AI-Generated Text Detection: Scans manuscripts for sections likely generated by AI, using sophisticated AI-detection tools to ensure content authenticity.
• Image Manipulation Detection: Compares images in manuscripts against a vast repository to detect potential manipulations or duplications, including zooms, flips, and cropping.
• Institution Verification: Checks for consistency and validity of institutional affiliations, helping to confirm the authenticity of authors' identities.
• Tortured Phrasing Detection: Identifies potentially problematic phrases often associated with paper mills or automated content generators.
• Flagging Cited Retracted Content: Cross-references citations with a database of retracted papers to prevent the propagation of flawed research.
• Paper Mill Alarm: Public - Scan for submissions suspiciously similar to known paper mill generated content. 

Investigation Management

Integrity Manager not only conducts these checks but also integrates them into a unified investigation management system. Here’s how the integrity management module centralizes the investigations workflow:

• Centralized Tracking: All alerts and flagged issues from the various checks are consolidated in one platform, enabling users to track and manage investigation activities.
• Streamlined Workflow: Users can access all relevant data and investigation outcomes from a single interface, reducing the complexity and administrative burden of managing multiple systems.
• Actionable Insights: The platform offers actionable insights and recommendations based on aggregated data, helping editorial teams make informed decisions and take appropriate actions.
• Historical Data Access: Maintains a record of all investigation activities and outcomes, facilitating ongoing monitoring and trend analysis to prevent future issues.

By integrating robust checks with a centralized investigation management system, Integrity Manager enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of research integrity teams.

Our team behind Integrity Manager is composed of experts in publishing, technology, data science, and research integrity, and we have over 100 years of experience in the publishing industry between us! We collaborate closely with senior leaders in the publishing industry, leveraging their insights to refine and enhance our platform continually, with new features released every 2 weeks. Our Strategic Advisory Board, established in December 2023, plays a crucial role in guiding our development efforts based on real-world needs and challenges.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

Integrity Manager is innovative in several key ways:

• Comprehensive Integration: Integrity Manager is the only enterprise-grade solution for integrity checks on the market. 
• Integrity Investigation Management: The first independent tool on the market offering comprehensive investigation management.
• Automation and Efficiency: The platform automates many manual tasks, significantly reducing the workload for editors and reviewers while lowering costs for publishers.
• Actionable Insights: Detailed reporting and analytics provide actionable insights, enabling the development of robust research integrity policies and the identification of broader trends.
• This all-in-one approach not only streamlines the integrity management process but also enhances the effectiveness of fraud detection and investigation.

What are your plans for the future?

We are continuously expanding the capabilities of Integrity Manager to cover more aspects of research integrity and further integrate emerging technologies. We aim to provide the most sophisticated tools for detecting and preventing research fraud, including advanced verification checks for authors and institutions to enhance credibility and reduce fraud risk. We frequently refine our platform based on user feedback and industry trends. Our goal is to continue to be the leading research integrity solution in the scholarly publishing industry, setting new standards for quality and trust in academic research.

About the author

Robyn Mugridge, Sales Director, Morressier

Robyn joined Morressier as Sales Director in 2024, bringing extensive experience from several international publishers. At Morressier, Robyn plays a pivotal role in expanding partnerships and driving the adoption of innovative integrity solutions. Previously, as Head of Publishing Partnerships at Frontiers, Robyn developed a passion for collaborating with societies and modernising publishing technology. In addition, as Co-Chair of the ALPSP Education Committee, Robyn enjoys bringing publishing professionals together to tackle shared challenges in the journal publishing industry.

More information:

Morressier Research Integrity Manager. 

Institutional Market Blues (and Grays)

ALPSP Blog by Course Tutor, Michael Zeoli, Director, Publisher Partner Program, De Gruyter Publishing.

“If you drop a book into the toilet, you can fish it out, dry it off and read that book.  But if you drop your Kindle in the toilet, you’re pretty well done.”  Stephen King

To say that the advent of the internet and personal computers have disrupted the worlds of content distribution is a dull commonplace. Disruption has, in fact, become the only constant. A simplified timeline of the appearance of a few well-known disruptors looks something like this:

Three decades on, we are still just at the beginning. Is it possible to find a ‘North Star’ to help guide our distribution decisions in a turbulent institutional market? We’d like to share a few high-level observations – for context – and then offer some specific considerations for publishers.

The diagram below is a highly simplified image of the evolution of a significant portion of the institutional market distribution eco-system. More recently, Open Access and AI large language models have presented further disruption in a rapidly changing landscape.

Even as late as 2008 or 2009, when print distributors to libraries began to integrate the digital newcomers, e.g., Netlibrary, ebrary, EBL, MyiLibrary, the vision persisted that libraries would just replace the print artifact with a digital facsimile in a one-to-one transfer of both the content and the budget allocation. How naïve!  Technology that powered Amazon and eBay and Napster would eventually overtake the quaint way in which academic libraries acquired books and their patrons consumed them!  Currently, for any given new university press title, there are often 14 access options available to libraries on a single vendor platform to select from (hardcover, paperback, 1-User, 3-User, Non-Linear Lending, Unlimited-User, etc.), and each under a variety of purchase options (auto-ship approval, slip notification/library order, Demand/Patron-Driven Acquisitions-DDA/PDA, Evidence-Based Acquisitions-EBA, etc.). Multiply that by multiple vendors and by 70,000 or more English-language scholarly books published annually, and the enormous challenge of discovery in libraries is frighteningly clear.

Technology-driven content access models and purchase models have upended not just traditional book distribution, but also fundamentally forced libraries, vendors, and publishers to dramatically re-imagine book distribution, accessibility, and the methods and meaning of library collection strategies. It is also revelatory that the epithet collection development is now commonly collection strategy.

With this thumbnail sketch of the challenges in the institutional marketplace, what are some of the key questions we should be asking our vendors – the middlemen with libraries – and what are key points for the publisher in terms of understanding commercial options and deciding how to manage them?

First, what to do with vendor reports and what questions are worth seeking responses to at annual meetings?

• What are the current market trends?
• How is the competitive landscape changing?  
• Which models are effective or damaging and how can we improve our participation?  
• How is pricing helping or hurting sales?  
• What are successful peer presses doing differently?
• How does the nature of your publishing impact on the effectiveness of access and purchase models?

And lastly, caveat emptor!  The way in which vendors present their numbers and couch discussions is also part of their competitive strategy in a fraught environment.  Some numbers may be hidden within a larger number or be presented in skewed ways or may not be presented at all.

Two points to bear in mind: 

1. The market is a closed system, that is library budgets are fixed, so an increase in sales in one channel will likely reflect a loss in another channel.  This does not mean that loss in one will equal growth in another – one system will likely produce better results than another, but what is important to understand is that your partners are competing for the same customers, often using similar tools.
   
   
2. Vendor access models and purchase models must be understood and managed attentively.  ‘Letting 1000 flowers bloom’ or supporting a ‘level playing field’ are not strategies and not successful means of managing commercial success in today’s market.

What data should you have to use vendor reports for analysis?

There are five essential datapoints needed from a vendor in a sales analysis for academic library book sales:

1. Number of *new titles* the vendor received from the publisher in each time period (a 15% increase in sales is wonderful, but was it caused simply by a 15% increase in new titles or was there something else at play?)
   
   
2. Rate of simultaneous ebook availability for the new print titles handled. Were print or ebooks sales impacted simply by availability? Was there a glitch in getting eContent delivered and loaded – or perhaps a significant portion of titles were deliberately unavailable in digital format? Did this play a role in an increase or decline of ebook sales?  Did print make up for a decline (never does!).
   
   
3. Aggregator sales in *units* as well as by and revenue *by purchase model*, i.e. DDA, EBA, etc.
   
   
4. Average sales price-per-title for print, ebooks, and by aggregator
   
   
5. Five-year trend for all data points (comparison over a long period provides indispensable context – comparing just one year over another does not give you a very good idea of how a publisher is trending).
   
   
6. Usage data is increasingly important.  Vendors vary in how much they will share with publishers.

To make decisions regarding pricing for the various ebook access models, a table such as the one below helps organize your options and decisions across multiple vendors. Bear in mind too, that since vendors use different models – or prioritize different models – and that sometimes models with the same name work differently on different vendor platforms, the idea of a ‘level playing field’ may not actually be the right strategy. Kim Williams at Princeton University Press calls her alternative strategy ‘curated partnerships’.  How does your ‘current pricing’ looks across your primary vendors?  Filling in that information in a table like this one will provide clarity that everything is as it should be – or not.

In similar fashion, to make decisions regarding various ebook access models, a table such as the one below may be helpful in organizing decisions across multiple vendors.

We hope you’ll consider joining Kim Williams and I later this month in our two-part ALPSP virtual training course. The focus of this will be building institutional sales strategies in connection with publisher aspirations and specializations, and Open Access will not be a focus. The ideas suggested in this brief piece will be explored in more depth with the goal of helping you to identify tools and methods to analyze and develop your commercial strategies in the institutional market(s). 

The ALPSP training course: 'Building Strategies for Managing Partnerships and Institutional eBook Sales' takes place on 24 and 25 June 2024. ALPSP is currently offering a summer discount of 20% off this course. Find out more.

About the author

Michael Zeoli, Director, Publisher Partner Program, De Gruyter Publishing

Michael has worked in scholarly publishing and academic libraries for more than two decades. He began his career with academic libraries as a supervisor in the Acquisitions Department at the University of Chicago Regenstein Library. He occupied many roles at YBP Library Services (now GOBI Library Solutions) where, as Vice President of Publisher Relations, he was responsible for consulting with publishers on academic library digital and print book sales and the purchase models offered by vendors and aggregators. Michael is currently Director, Publisher Partner Program at De Gruyter and has provided consulting to many scholarly publishers. 

Exploring AI Copyright Policy in the UK

By Will Crook, Head of Policy and Communications, Publishers' Licensing Services – Platinum Sponsor of the University Press Redux Conference 2024.
 

On 24 July 2019, on his first day at 10 Downing Street, Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s Chief Advisor, was pictured wearing an Open AI t-shirt. Although perhaps overlooked at the time, Dominic Cummings’ wardrobe choice reflected the UK government’s belief that AI was going to be the solution to a lot of the UK’s economic problems, such as low growth and poor productivity. With the aim of establishing the UK as an ‘AI superpower’ and an international home to AI innovation, the government published its AI strategy in 2021 and outlined what it would do to facilitate AI innovation. One area it turned to was copyright.

Copyright has always been a target when new technology is adopted that challenges its basic principles, or when those developing that technology complain it limits innovation. The problems caused by the adoption and use of the photocopier led to the creation, by publishers, of Publishers’ Licensing Services (or as it was then, the Publishers Licensing Society) in 1981 as a voluntary solution to put pressure on copyright. More recently, the 2011 Hargreaves Review into IP and innovation led to the introduction of the current copyright exception for non-commercial text and data mining (TDM). As it has done before, with AI looked upon as a crucial technology for future growth, the government looked at the copyright framework and how it could be changed to help AI developers, who complained that licensing copyright protected content was expensive, inconvenient and prohibitive to growth.

In 2022, after consulting on a range of potential options, the government announced it was to introduce a new copyright exception for TDM for any purpose with no ability for a rightsholder to opt out. The new exception would have drastically widened the current exception for TDM and would have weakened the UK’s copyright framework meaning that rightsholders would have no ability to consent to the use of their works in generative AI training or receive any renumeration. The response from the creative industries to the government’s decision was unanimous, with strong opposition across the whole sector from publishers, authors, visual artists and musicians. At the time, a creative industry colleague dryly commented that the government’s decision had done something almost unprecedented and had united the whole sector in agreement around one issue. Thankfully, the government heard that opposition and relented, scrapping the intention to introduce a new copyright exception in February 2023.

With the criticism of its previous approach in mind, the government decided to continue to look at the relationship between copyright and AI in a more balanced way. Towards the summer of 2023 the Intellectual Property Office arranged a working group comprised of rightsholder representatives and AI developers to meet for a series of roundtables to discuss the drafting of a voluntary code of practice for the use of copyright protected works in AI. However, talks were difficult with the government showing little direction on copyright and preferring to be an ‘honest broker’, and with trust damaged amongst the participants after the failed exception proposal coupled with the refusal of some AI participants to acknowledge the need to obtain a licence. These elements with the increasing amount of litigation in the US and UK by rightsholders against AI developers meant that the talks ultimately proved fruitless and work to develop the code of practice was brought to a halt by government in early 2024.

With an abandoned new copyright exception and a collapsed code of practice process, where will the government turn next? 

In February 2024, the government announced that it would pursue a ministerial-led process and that details of further engagement were to be announced in due course, which so far has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, away from the executive, MPs and committees in both houses of parliament have been strongly supportive of rightsholders and copyright, and highly critical of the government. Baroness Stowell, Chair of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee recently wrote to the secretary of state complaining that the government’s lack of decisiveness and action to protect copyright had led to the deterioration of the framework and that time to act was running out before AI business models became ‘entrenched and normalised’. The government’s inaction is sharply reflected by progress being made in other jurisdictions on AI, such as the European Union that recently adopted its own AI Act that included provisions on transparency and adherence to copyright. Perhaps indicative of where the government find themselves on copyright and AI, in the House of Lords last week, the Minister for AI and IP, Viscount Camrose predicted that copyright would need to be modified through legislation to reach a solution but gave no details of what changes would be made. One thing, however, above all other matters, will likely intervene before anything is decided by the current administration: the next general election.

It is highly likely that the Labour Party will form the next government. Whilst it may be comforting to think that Labour may decide to take a stronger pro-creative industries copyright stance, the reality is that whoever the next IP minister is they will face the same scenario with some AI developers continuing to use content without permission and ignoring copyright. The new minister will be asked by officials to decide on a solution whilst under the same economic pressures of the current government. As focus turns to future policy, Labour has so far not given much away as to what it may choose to do. Labour’s recently published Creative Industries Sector Plan is positive about copyright but does not include detail as to how the UK’s framework would be protected or indeed strengthened in the face of pressure from AI developers. 

All the while, as the above has been playing out in Westminster, publishers have used the time to strike licensing deals with AI developers. What was a nascent market is now developing, as publishers better understand the needs of AI developers and how their content is being copied and used in large language models and generative AI. Where medium and small publishers may be commercially disadvantaged in negotiations, collective licensing solutions are also being developed that offer publishers control and the ability to earn for the use of their content. These welcome developments weaken the government’s view of copyright’s relationship with AI ingestion as difficult and complex. If anything, it shows that clear opportunities to license exist for publishers and that AI developers are willing to obtain them to use the valuable, curated content they need for their models. If AI is to continue to innovate and become a trusted everyday tool at home and work, the government would be wise to remember that it also needs an economically sustainable publishing industry to continue to provide high quality, curated content in appropriate formats to fuel that innovation, with copyright again crucially providing the balance needed for that partnership to blossom. 

About the author

Will Crook, Head of Policy and Communications, Publishers' Licensing Services Ltd.

Will joined PLS in December 2021 after working in Westminster for six years as a researcher for Andrew Bingham MP and for former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Rt Hon John Whittingdale OBE MP. His main responsibilities are to engage with members of both houses in parliament on issues affecting copyright and licensing, to respond to relevant government consultations on behalf of PLS and ensure that PLS and mandating PLS publishers are updated on policy issues.

About Publishers’ Licensing Services

Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) has provided rights and licensing services to the publishing industry since 1981. A non-profit, owned and directed by the four main UK publishing trade associations, our primary role is to maximise the value of published content, enable its legitimate re-use, and protect copyright through effective secondary licensing, permissions, and rights management services. In 2023-2024 PLS collected and distributed more than £43 million to over 4,500 publishers.