Academics shocked after T&F sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
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Scientific research output should be free, universally, without hindrance.
It's myopic to try extract wealth from this public good by siloing it, by toll-gating access to it. Like barricading a public highway with toll-booths every 500 meters: it's a myopia that's blind to the public-good value of infrastructure—a myopia of greed that's a universal drain on public wealth, for some petty local optimization.
If you obstruct ML models on some financial profit theory, you're obstructing not only the ML entities; you're obstructing the thousand researchers downstream who stand to benefit from them. You're standing the in road blocking traffic, collecting tolls; you've not only stopped the vehicle in front of you, you've stopped a thousand more stranded behind it. It is a public nuisance.
If they're not comfortable with that, then they aren't comfortable with their research being free-as-in-freedom.
You can think that researchers shouldn't expect attribution either. I'd disagree, but in any case, removing that would significantly change the implicit social contract of academic research. Journal publishers and tech companies shouldn't be able to do that unilaterally.
I don't really agree on the hard line of "information should be free", but the first step to that ordeal isn't to remove incentives from creators. If creators didn't have to fear for being left in the dirt by corporations after having a breakthrough, we wouldn't need copyright to begin with.
Do you have a citation for that? Annual budget of the NSF is about $8 billion, covering all of science. Total NIH is $45 billion, and that includes other things. DOE Office of Science is about $8 billion. I think both of those cover a vast majority of grants funded in academia.
I suppose if you factor in some sort of tax breaks you could increase that, but I doubt you would get to trillions.
(I say this because I feel people drastically overestimate the amount of funding science gets in the US. For example, compare the above numbers with the profits of big tech companies)
In the US. Also even in the US, is NASA included in one of those? Looks like it costs around 20B yearly. There may be more from the US, and then there's, you know, the rest of the world combined too.
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-busine...
>"We are at a crossroads in the production and dissemination of research knowledge, and in my view the biggest problem with this deal is the reduction of academic research into raw content from which data can be extracted and repackaged as knowledge," Clemens said.
I'm sorry, what? The problem researchers have is their research being used as a resource for general knowledge? Do they only want their research to be helpful for other research and never have applicability outside academia?
It's all a question of who gets to do this first, until then everyone who doesn't gatekeep is a sucker. You think M$ won't do this?
I mean.. if dissemination of knowledge _truly_ is the end goal here.. and not just giving a free corporate lunch out because the job market is the broken and dysfunctional.
And you are confused. The immediate goal/purpose of academic work is to create knowledge. I said nothing about the underlying purpose of this goal. The ultimate purpose of this goal is to provide the foundation for a better society, which includes the knowledge being used to build better technologies, products, and processes by for profit companies.
The antipathy towards profit is one of the many great contradictions of the Left. They will willingly make the public worse off in order to prevent a private profit.
You literally said "The whole purpose of being an academic is to publish and disseminate knowledge." You are now saying this means something different than it's apparent reading?
> which includes the knowledge being used to build better technologies, products, and processes by for profit companies.
Why then do you think these entities are entitled to the output of academics without paying for it, or as a compromise, contributing back to the pool of global knowledge in kind?
What I'm getting at is the way you and the GP have framed this position is that you might then consider it wrong for an academic to charge for access to their work or for themselves to start a business and profit from it. That seems off to me.
> The antipathy towards profit is one of the many great contradictions of the Left.
This is an oversimplification of an easily understood nuance. For profit companies are obviously fine but we might also want a measure to determine if any one entity is contributing more to society than it is extracting from it.
In lieu of this perhaps forcing companies to contribute back to the same body of public knowledge that they obviously benefit from is not some great contradictory injustice.
> They will willingly make the public worse off in order to prevent a private profit.
Since business have no natural right to exist we, as people, have every right to exclude some of them from operating or even existing at all. Is my aversion to slavery actually a disguised antipathy towards profit?
[0] https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/advocacy/info-2019/gen...
Because historically speaking, private profit does not fundamentally "provide the foundation for a better society". If we had more benevolent actors in my lifetime, I'd feel differently. But it's always a monkey's paw. I see no contradiction to be afraid of being exploited when everytime a cool idea scales massively it ends up exploiting me.
I have not kept up with the latest on LLM’s and licensing, but I’m curious: are scientific papers accessible to LLMs? Honestly, a bigger societal loss in my view is publishers like Elsevier restricting LLM access to research articles, rather than being too permissive. I could not care less if Elsevier makes a little bit of money in the process.
hand-waving it by "oh just have corporations promise they will cite their sources, honor system" is the easiest way to not have corporations cite their sources. Plus if these corporations are so gun-ho about how "we don't store your data in an LLM", that wouldn't be a trivial matter anyway.
>a bigger societal loss in my view is publishers like Elsevier restricting LLM access to research articles, rather than being too permissive.
it's only a bigger loss if you think the knowledge will be proportionally handed down to society. Which it rarely is.
It’s just as much a waste of grant money too. Whether that comes from or from a nonprofit, padding the pockets of some publishing company gatekeeper is in no way what anyone should expect their money to go toward.
I have been e-mailing authors directly for access to the article and have been successful most of the time. Maybe once or twice, the e-mails go unanswered. In one case, the primary author had died (a subsequent search linked a news article showing a skiing accident). In another case, the author had simply moved to a different university thus the e-mail in the paper was outdated.
“Greetings,
I am interested in reading your paper, “[title of paper],” but I have only been able to find paywalled versions. Would you please send me a copy?
Thank you,
trogdor”
Those are both topics that can be a post in and of itself, so I'll just keep it simple and emphasize once again that we should implement the 3C's when asking of anything from another person's IP. I doubt many of the older papers/articles had contracts that allowed for such usage. Reinforced by the article:
>The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.
regardless of your position, this publishing group at worst lied and at best is being irresponsible, this isn't even an issue of AI or copyright. We can debate "well this is how it should be", but let's leave ShouldLand for a bit and actually look at the current situation. Trust being broken in real time.
We need new publishing models with strict copyright protections that protect against theft. Academics should run their own publishing houses as a cooperative.
Yeah, this is definitely going to change the world. I'm not sure if it'll be for the better.
Granted you may argue that is done poorly today but it certainly doesn't happen for no costs.
It's part of the culture. I write a paper. I want to get it published. Journals need someone to review it. If I refuse to peer review others' papers, then in principle people may refuse to review mine and we both lose.
Sure, it'd be nice if publishers passed some of the profits to both authors and reviewers, but that would create other perverse incentives.
> and what real care do they take when they are doing it for free?
Not much. They sometimes sit on it for months before reviewing it.
Name recognition. Top journals are harder to publish into - you (supposedly) need a higher impact piece of work to get published in it.
Same idea with universities. The top ranked universities don't necessarily give you a better education. But that certificate sure helps.
> But I don’t get it now. Why does anyone gift them their papers?
Same answer as above. You're a researcher who is trying to get tenure. You published in Nature. Good chance you'll get tenure. You published on your own site and have a Google Doc of reviewer feedback? Anyone can create that. You won't get tenure.
One benefit is that you generally get free access to the journal in question for a month or two while you are reviewing. So if you are regularly reviewing papers, you get free access to that journal. If you are part of a big org you probably already have access but it is a nice little benefit for people outside big academic orgs.
You can also include it on your CV if you want and there are a variety of small recognitions you can get for doing it.
And some publishers will also give you a fairly substantial discount (25+%) on texts purchased through that publisher as well as similarly substantial discounts on publishing and editing services provided by the publisher. Sage does this for example and their services include things like translation services, editing, infographic & artwork design, and animating video summaries for papers. They seem like they are quite nice services so getting discounts on them would probably be a good selling point for some people.
Another reason is just because you'd be reading the journal anyways and you don't mind doing a deep dive every once in a while on a random paper in your field. This reason is mostly a "well why not I'm already spending the time" kind of reason but it's a decent justification.
And the main reason is just because it's kind of expected of a lot of PhDs and being good at reviewing is a useful skill to have, especially if you are going to eventually be someone else's advisor or just in general if you want to be able to effectively critique your own works and the works of those around you. Being a reviewer for at least some times means you know the system and you can help keep your own papers and the papers of your colleagues from getting rejected for dumb reasons or oversights.
no one, all of that gets published constantly
No, we need new publishing models that release the publicly-funded information into the public domain. If tax dollars paid for the research then there should be no copyright on the results of that research at all, owned by the publisher or authors.
This wouldn't represent a change for the authors anyway, who already are accustomed to having to sign away copyright (hence this story). The problem in this instance isn't that the papers are being fed into machine learning models, the problem is that the publisher is extracting a check for the privilege.
I see no indication that the affected academics are concerned with the money that their papers make them. Most want to give them away for free to HUMANS.
Edit: [1] By others, I mean our university libraries and any poor soul who does not have membership in one. Today, universities pay to access their own research.
They clearly employ lots of bureaucrats, middle managers, and lawyers. They are constantly trying to make sketchy side deals with third parties, as T&F did. They employ copyeditors, who in theory (and sometimes in practice) improve papers but who very often are totally incompetent. They maintain large databases of something-or-other, presumably so they can sell out my data. They maintain complicated systems to submit and review papers, when it seems that email would suffice, presumably so they can track all this metadata they want to sell. Oh! And they lobby the government for their own selfish ends:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j...
Seriously. Imagine all of them up and vanished tomorrow. Would anybody miss them?
A fancy watch. A low production supercar you can’t buy unless you have 5 of the same marque already. All the same broken stupid pattern.
Discoverability, relatively stable hosting, and the most base-level vetting and credibility are problems that they address, even if they do so poorly and greedily. If they went away tomorrow, so would the databases of work they manage, the APIs libraries use to query them, their mechanisms to confirm that whoever said they published something actually published it... Publishers don't have to be the answer-- I think a lot of these problems could be resolved through field organizations, librarianship and university organizations, but what's the likelihood that of universities and field organizations will try to monetize it and essentially become publishers in all of the worst ways?
No they don't. They get that for free too, with "volunteer editors".
Stable hosting and gatekeeping, that's about it.
That's what Google and other search engines are for. arxiv.org even has its own search function. Nobody depends on journals for this.
> Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world?
No, just post it on a known website like arxiv.org. Then anyone with Internet access can get to it, and they don't even have to go to a library.
> If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way
You do have to have academic credentials to post papers on arxiv.org.
Not only that, but plenty of papers published in journals turn out to have been bogus--not just wrong (many papers published in good faith later turn out to be wrong, that's part of science) but based on faked data, and nobody in the journal review chain spotted it. So the supposed vetting that journals provide doesn't really add any value anyway.
> What if they lose their domain?
arxiv.org is supported by many academic institutions and foundations. They're not going anywhere.
> If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers?
By being arxiv.org or something like it. In other words, there is already an existing example of a non-publisher that addresses all the problems you say journal publishers address--and does it much better.
Probably not much. Arxiv works pretty well. Usenix is already open access. NSF-funded research already has to comply with their 12 month open access policy (zero months would be better though.)
I don't see many good reasons for journals to stick with non open access publishers.
Having a totally artificial middleman makes no sense when basically all publishing happens digitally. And the public deserves full access to the science they have funded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Colour_naming_syst...
Are they not a fact discoverer or truth revealer?
It's unclear to me researchers should “own” truths prior research and public patronage enabled them to unearth.
// note: research != invention, i.e., Space X experimenting until systems and machinery can land a rocket on a barge is not “research”, but testing and documenting characteristics of fuels in a vacuum as the environment swings from -100C to 120C is
Why? What else could it be if not research?
it could be experimentation and learning about your own invented system and mechanic, not uncovering of existing truths
the word "search" makes this more clear, the answers research finds already exist, we just didn't find them yet. that is not the case for inventions that don't work, and need to be experimented with until they work.
there may, certainly, be some incidental research discovery while attempting to make an invention work (e.g. if Space X had hit on something new about physics itself that had been causing their prior experiments to fail) -- but nobody "owns" such truth discovered, while of course they own their invention that works as a result of applying known truths to a creation.
The article seems to want to bring rights holders together in a way that isn’t valid.
A scientific paper is normative. Its construction is closer to a pull request than artwork.
The form is what is under copyright, and the form of the paper is normative, while I would argue the form of the art, if normative, makes it illustration and not art.
If I change the hypothesis and data of a paper I change the entire meaning and consequence of the paper, although the style remains constant. If I change the palette and subject of a painting, the style remains the same and it would not be considered anything more than trivially novel.
If style is art, then there is no art in scientific papers.