If information is the oil of our age, AI tools are the refineries. For-profit publishers are locking up supply.
Informa, which owns big-five journal company Taylor and Francis announces a three-year non-exclusive AI partnership with Microsoft, including “access to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems.“
This upsets academics with articles in T&F journals, who, as is the industry norm and clear in contracts, are unpaid for their work. But this may not be what they should most object to – part of the three-year US$10m for starters Microsoft deal is, “explore the development of specialised expert agents for customers such as authors and librarians to assist with research, understanding and new knowledge creation/sharing.”
It appears that having monetised researchers’ work once, the publisher is seeking to do it again – “customers,” is the give-away – with an AI function that explores the archives.
A nice little earner, especially compared to what leader of the research publishing pack, (2,900 journals) Elsevier is up to.
Its Scopus database includes 27,800 peer-reviewed journals, with metadata and abstracts of articles now searchable by a dedicated AI. The search function includes data extraction, citations and altmetrics to identify impact and predictive analytics to suggest new research areas.
And there are billions of barrels of information as oil to search. Scopus had 90m “content records” a year or so back.
Whether the research leads generated are value for money, will depend on the quality of the AI and what using it costs – about which Elsevier is not telling, “ the exact cost depends on several factors, including whether you are an existing Scopus customer.”
But whatever that is, it will be a new revenue stream for companies that will keep publishing articles if only to give their AI tools new content to analyse. And academics will keep publish them, unless they want their findings to be excluded from the dedicated AI research refineries.
