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Weekly News Digest

March 28, 2023 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

EDP Sciences Shares Stance on AI and Academic Publishing

EDP Sciences notes, “The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in writing has sparked discussions around ethics and authorship in the academic publishing industry. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has presented an overview of the current debates on its website and has recently published a position statement regarding the use of AI in research papers.”

COPE states that “AI tools cannot be listed as authors of a paper, as they cannot meet the requirements for authorship, take responsibility for the submitted work, assert conflicts of interest, or manage copyright and license agreements. Authors must be transparent in disclosing if and how AI tools were used in their paper. …”

For more information, read the news item.

Modak Rolls Out New Version of Data Orchestration Platform for Life Sciences Companies

For more information, read the press release.

Exploring the Outcome of the Internet Archive Lawsuit

On March 24, The Verge reported, “A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library.”

On March 25, Mashable shared, “Prior to COVID, the Internet Archive lent e-books via a ‘controlled digital lending’ system, or CDL: Libraries offer loans of digitized book copies on a one-to-one basis—that means that they circulate the exact number of copies they own. When [its National Emergency Library] launched, Internet Archive removed all waitlists for books and lent out any amount of copies on a two-week basis.”

On March 26, NPR noted:

The Internet Archive, which strives to provide ‘universal access to all knowledge,’ said its emergency online library was legal under the doctrine of fair use.

But on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York sided with the publishers, saying established law was on their side. …

The Internet Archive said it will appeal the ruling.

On March 27, industry expert Nate Hoffelder stated, “I think where the Internet Archive went wrong was that they took their years of experience as a research library (archiving content with little commercial value) and tried to apply the same practices as a public library (sharing commercially available works). The problem with this is that applying a research library’s preservation practices to commercially available content destroys that content’s value. This is why the [Internet Archive] got sued, and why internet lefties such as myself are opposing the [Internet Archive].”

OpenAthens Partners With News Platform for Teaching Media Literacy

“With just a click or swipe students can compare related articles to see what details are being emphasized, exaggerated or left out entirely,” the press release notes. “Stories on Ground News are accompanied by bias, factuality and ownership ratings derived from independent news monitoring organizations. Knowing the bias of a media outlet can help students understand how and why a story is being framed a certain way.” 

For more information, read the press release.

Insider Weighs In on ChatGPT and White-Collar Jobs

… ChatGPT isn’t the first chatbot or artificial intelligence tool to change the way we work. 

So why all the hype?

According to Daniela Rus, a professor and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, it’s because it’s the first widely accessible and easy-to-use AI tool for non-experts. …

For now, what ChatGPT can actually do is fairly limited, experts told Insider. While chatbots and other tools that use AI could put some jobs at risk, most users should embrace the chatbot to make their lives easier.

For more information, read the article.

NISO Now Seeking Comments on Content Profile/Linked Document Standard Draft

NISO notes the following:

The new NISO CP/LD standard will provide a flexible industry standard for linking and combining academic, research, and professional content, data, and semantics. It defines a machine-readable, self-describing, standards-based markup format that can be used to exchange data between systems, APIs, and services. CP/LD is not intended to replace existing models used for journal articles, books, data sets, or semantic and metadata schemes. Instead, this new standard enables arbitrary portions of content, data, semantics, and other resources from separate sources to be combined into a single, standards-based format optimized for interchange, search, and display. Stratification of the document into different layers or roles—content, structure, narrative data, and semantic data—is key to the CP/LD standard, allowing the specific requirements for each role to be addressed.

For more information, read the press release.

Patron Point Introduces Online Marketing Training for Public Libraries

“The training is offered to all public libraries regardless of if they subscribe to Patron Point’s marketing automation platform or not. Patron Point customers receive one complimentary seat with their subscriptions,” Patron Point notes.

For more information, read the press release.

Cochrane Opens Its Systematic-Review Production Software to Institutions and Individuals

“The product is presented on a Software-as-a-Service basis: Cochrane offers a hosted service, comprising the software and cloud storage of all review data uploaded,” Cochrane shares. “RevMan Web facilitates the creation of meta-analyses, forest plots, risk-of-bias tables, and other systematic review elements. It is acknowledged to be easy-to-use—and is also widely used in learning or training about systematic review production.”

For more information, read the news item.

U.K. Government Proposes Approach for Regulating AI

The U.K. government on [March 29] published recommendations for the artificial intelligence industry, outlining an all-encompassing approach for regulating the technology at a time when it has reached frenzied levels of hype.

In a white paper to be put forward to Parliament, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will outline five principles it wants companies to follow. They are: safety, security and robustness; transparency and explainability; fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress.

Rather than establishing new regulations, the government is calling on regulators to apply existing regulations and inform companies about their obligations under the white paper. …

It comes after other countries have come up with their own respective regimes for regulating AI. In China, the government has required tech companies to hand over details on their prized recommendation algorithms, while the European Union has proposed regulations of its own for the industry.

For more information, read the article.

The Scholarly Kitchen Looks at the Internet Archive Lawsuit

Controlled digital lending (CDL) is really at the heart of [the Internet Archive (IA)] suit, more so than the focus on the emergency nature of the IA program. In fact, what is striking is that the case hardly mentioned that this was a temporary program in the depths of a lock down that ceased within months of being started. Publishers were not simply seeking to end a short-term program, but are seeking to limit the ability of libraries to engage in new approaches to existing rights that libraries have as established in copyright law.

This is a situation where bad facts bring about bad case law. The Internet Archive was certainly trying to extend the understanding of existing Fair Use rights under copyright law with the extension of its National Emergency Library, but the practice of controlled digital lending had been in place and practiced by institutions for several years prior to 2020, when the IA pushed out its service to anyone, anywhere, at any time. It is instructive that the publishing community waited until 2020 to act against IA, when the facts were most aligned to provide them a concrete and expansive win. The publishers did not pursue the many libraries that have used much more limited applications of CDL to serve their constituents. …

In this case, as is in so many aspects, the law is woefully inadequate to address the modern digital ecosystem and how a significant portion of the public interact with content.

For more information, read the blog post.