SOME THINGS ARE FAR BEYOND PARODY.

As if there aren't far too many Minimal Publishable Units for a scholar to keep up with, now algorithms that never have to fear a tenure review will get in on the action.  "Taylor & Francis AI Deal Sets ‘Worrying Precedent’ for Academic Publishing."

I'm not surprised.

It is no accident, dear reader, that Taylor and Francis figure in this story. If there's a Herfindahl index for online citations by Real Peer Review, #tandfonline would probably head the list. I don't believe in coincidences, though, and perhaps there are working academicians, even in the fever swamps of culture studies, who are as disgusted by the proliferation of online outlets for people more interested in racking up refereed publications for their own sake, rather than, oh, taking on challenging projects and participating in an intelligent conversation.

It's hard enough to put together a short list of job candidates, let alone evaluate the publication records of your colleagues, not to mention serving as an external reviewer for somebody's promotion docket with all the pay-to-publish journals cluttering the enterprise, and now counting citations might be more challenging with the bots doing Oprah:  You get a citation, and you get a citation, and you get a citation!

Academic 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.

What the bots do is likely to offer even more material for mockery than the human contributors to Taylor and Francis have.  "As long as Taylor and Francis proliferate those trendy journals, Campus Reform and Real Peer Review and the rest are unlikely to be idle."

In a world where some scholars pay obsessive attention to those citation counts, and perhaps where careerist deanlets think doing so is the quintessence of "data-driven" administration, there's apparently still some integrity left.

“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.

She admits she’s optimistic that the deal means well-researched, accurate data will be used to train AI models. “Then, there’s the other side of me that wonders, if it’s going into AI, is it going to properly contextualize my work?” she said. “Or is it going to take my words and my thoughts out of context and misrepresent them because it’s not giving the full picture?”

The proliferation of pay-to-publish online journals might say more about the current state of sharing and presenting than any individual fretting about being quoted out of context.  On top of that, perhaps academicians get more notoriety when some media chatterbox takes an argument out of context than any number of citations in the field's top journals.

The deeper fear, though, might be that the bots will be making it harder for referees, let alone professors evaluating class or capstone papers, to catch the copying.

The deal could also mean the potential loss of citations, which are valuable currency in a scholar’s career.

“What we’ve seen of AI by and large is that it’s not very good at citing or articulating what came from where and why,” Lance Eaton, a higher education consultant who specializes in generative AI, said. “Here, the publisher is selling the content to an AI tool, which we don’t know how it’s going to be used, but we know they want the scholarly information. What happens to those ideas in that scholarship? How does it get used and how do people get credit for it?”

I suspect academicians will find a way.  Here I am ten years retired and on occasion I still get messages telling me that so-and-so looked at such-and-such with my name on it.  That's a story for another day.