In a move that has resonated throughout the academic community, Informa, the conglomerate behind Taylor & Francis, has entered into a $10 million data-access agreement with Microsoft. This partnership, announced in May, grants Microsoft nonexclusive rights to use “Advanced Learning Content” from nearly 3,000 journals managed by Taylor & Francis. Following the initial payment, Informa will benefit from recurring payments over the next three years.
This development has taken the academic world by surprise, raising concerns among U.S. and European scholars about the repurposing of their research by AI technologies. Lauren Barbeau, Assistant Director of Learning and Technology Initiatives at Georgia Institute of Technology, expressed her astonishment, noting, “I was shocked, not that it had happened, but that no one had said anything to us at all.” She also highlighted the lack of control authors have over their work: “There’s so little agency given to the authors about how their work is going to be shared and presented to the world.”
Despite recognizing the potential benefits of high-quality data being used to train AI models, Barbeau remains wary about the implications: “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… I just didn’t expect it to be my publisher.” She fears that her work may be misrepresented if not properly contextualized by AI.
Echoing these sentiments, Ruth Alison Clemens, a lecturer at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, voiced her concerns on social media platform X, stating, “The bulk sale of data to big tech to train AI that has as-yet unknown reach & applications sets a new and worrying precedent for data capitalism & academic research. So email your editors!”
For small business owners and solopreneurs who rely on academic insights to fuel their innovations, this arrangement might affect the accessibility and integrity of research outputs. The potential reduction in citations, a key metric in academic recognition, poses an additional threat to scholars and researchers whose work underpins smaller enterprises. This deal serves as a critical reminder of the evolving landscape of information sharing and the profound impacts these shifts can have on both academic and entrepreneurial communities.
