Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI

2 years ago by Steve to c/techtakes

Authors claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment.

Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

On top of it all, that is such a low-ball number from Microsoft

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.

UnseriousAcademic 57 points 2 years ago

If this includes their journals then I guess my stuff is off to the big LLM melting pot to be regurgitated wrongly without context or attribution.

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frunch 23 points 2 years ago

Yay progress 😐

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TragicNotCute 12 points 2 years ago

Progress is delicious. Like glue in your pasta sauce.

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TWeaK 55 points 2 years ago

£10 million for a huge chunk of the world's knowledge, without paying the authors. They do nothing and sell us for cheap.

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sunzu 10 points 2 years ago

Rent seekers bruhh I don't see why people are still denial about how the exploitation regime operates

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fasterandworse 41 points 2 years ago

"it is providing Microsoft non-exclusive access to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems".

I wish it wasn't normal to call these "systems" instead of "products"

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TWeaK 22 points 2 years ago

Exactly. There needs to be a proper lawsuit challenging AI businesses, and the fact they're taking out these contracts now, after the fact, suggests they know they're liable. They've tried hiding behind the fair use research exemption, however their "research" is complete private and secret, offers no benefit to the academic community, and is entirely driven by commercial product development.

I wonder if individual users have standing to claim for the initial harvesting from before these licenses? At the time, while they got it from reddit or wherever, they collected it without any license, which I think means the original rights holder should be able to sue.

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skillissuer 29 points 2 years ago

disgusted, yeah, shocked, not really, have you seen the kind of shit elsevier pulls out? now T&F content joins all open access papers in wisdom woodchipper

$10M is peanuts, reddit deal was 6x bigger

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pyrex 15 points 2 years ago

I mean, if no one's getting paid, then my preferred price is $0, to everyone in the world.

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iAvicenna 12 points 2 years ago

academic publishing companies are truly the scum of the Earth.

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dgerard 4 points 2 years ago

here too

https://pivot-to-ai.com/...

saw academics grumbling about free labour, so well done v clever T&F

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Grimy 0 points 2 years ago

This is the main reason why I think advocating for stronger copyright laws when it comes to AI is simply foolhardy. Individuals will never get a dime out of any of this, might as well keep it free for everyone and have an open-source scene that's thriving.

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