I’m cynical.
I’m much less surprised by this than others…
The publisher didn’t give authors any notice before selling access to its data to Microsoft for $10 million. The agreement could improve academic research, but it further entrenches the predatory nature of academic publishing, experts say.
cademic researchers around the world are reeling from news announced in May that Informa, the parent company of academic publisher Taylor & Francis, has signed a $10 million data-access agreement with Microsoft.
The AI partnership agreement gives Microsoft “nonexclusive access to Advanced Learning Content” across Taylor & Francis’s nearly 3,000 academic journals. After the initial access fee of $10 million, Informa said it would receive recurring payments for the next three years.
Scholars across the U.S. and Europe said the news took them by surprise and they’re worried about how their research will be republished and cited by the publisher’s AI tools.
“I was shocked, not that it had happened, but that no one had said anything to us at all,” said Lauren Barbeau, assistant director of learning and technology initiatives at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has also published a book with Routledge, an academic publisher owned by Taylor & Francis.
“I’ve come to terms with the fact, as an author who has published, that at some point my work is going to go into AI, whether that’s through an illegal copy published somewhere on the internet or some other means. I just didn’t expect it to be my publisher.”
Barbeau said what disturbs her the most “is that there’s so little agency given to the authors about how their work is going to be shared and presented to the world,” which underscores the already “predatory” nature of academic publishing.
