Open Scholarship vs AI: Thoughts from the Front Line of Scholarly Resources

The rapid rise of easily accessible generative AI tools since 2022, and the release of OpenAI’s Chat GPT, means that research libraries such as the Bodleian Libraries must engage thoughtfully with this technology and the threats and opportunities it offers in the scholarly landscape. Most importantly, we are seeing a tension emerge between open scholarship and the desire to prevent wholesale intellectual property misuse or appropriation by commercial companies. Recent work at the Bodleian Libraries on the effects of commercial AI scraping of library content has raised a fundamental question about the tension between open research and commercial use of intellectual property. We are in the early stages of our thinking and would like to use this poster to examine some of the most vexing issues and to test some of our ideas with the European library community. Our poster covers these areas: Firstly, what can technically be done to limit automated web scraping of library content and the implications of doing so for open scholarship. Secondly, the impact of governmental policies and legislation around AI which have the potential to impact or even disrupt the scholarly publication landscape,- and how we are looking at responses and partnership around developments to copyright and licensing legislation as well as opportunities for direct engagement and advocacy with AI tech companies. We will conclude by showing how we at the Bodleian are planning to address the actual and perceived risks for our researchers and staff, and how we are beginning to tackle the biggest technological change of the decade.