Each new change in scholarly communication promises to make research fairer, faster, more transparent. Yet, in many cases, researchers, especially from under resourced countries or from countries where English is not the first language, face added pressure to catch up, rather than to move forward.
Nearly three years after ChatGPT’s debut, generative AI continues to reshape scholarly publishing. The sector has moved from experimentation toward integration, with advances in ethical writing tools, AI-driven discovery, summarization, and automated peer review. While workflows are becoming more efficient, the long-term impact on research creation and evaluation remains uncertain.
Between a political policy environment focused on defunding and deleting data collections – an environment in which little can be trusted – and an onslaught of new AI tools that feed indiscriminately on data, bits of information at the intersection of rows and columns are appearing in headlines more than ever before. To avoid cultural memory loss, we must build systems that save what humanity needs across disciplinary silos rather than saving some archives and losing others through an accident of history.
AI web harvesting bots are different from traditional web crawlers and violate many of the established rules and practices in place. Their rapidly expanding use is emerging as a significant IT management problem for content-rich websites across numerous industries.
NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) survey reflects the positive and negative expectations of generative AI in web-scale discovery tools.
What happens when AI-infused information systems increasingly provide answers rather than directing people to sources?
If LLMs are the future of information discovery, valuable scholarly content risks being left behind — unless we build a bridge with better licensing.
AI-enabled discovery and summarization tools seem like magic to end users, but for publishers it looks like disintermediation.
This post explores why many Middle East- and North Africa-based journals remain underrepresented in global indexing databases, how this affects both local and international knowledge flows, and what alternative pathways can bring the region into fuller view.
AI-assisted search is here, and librarians need to have an honest discussion about how to integrate this new technology into library services. This post explores the parallels to the introduction of discovery layers and how to overcome some of the discomfort librarians might have with retrieval-augmented generation.
It is time for OA proponents to engage in public debate with academic associations, universities and national funding agencies, because the widespread use of academic content in AI models poses significant risks for the research ecosystem.
The renaming of “Mount Denali” and “Gulf of Mexico” to the politically loaded “Mount McKinley” and “Gulf of America” reveal the naked truth of what cataloging has always been: a battlefield where meaning is contested and conquered.
Will the next generation of professions be impressed with the content platforms and workflow tools we currently have? Angela Cochran imagines a world where we meet the challenge of modernized systems.
This is the first article of three in a guest series reflecting on the main themes and ideas gathered and discussed at the Munin Conference at the end of 2024. Today’s focus is bibliodiversity.
Why does everything on the internet look and feel the same? What role are algorithms playing in driving cultural stagnation (and what might it mean for scholarly discovery)?