Two major academic publishers, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, recently announced partnerships that will give tech companies access to academic content and other data in order to train artificial-intelligence models, a move some academics see as just the latest way their work is being exploited.
One of those tech companies, Microsoft, paid Informa, the parent company of Taylor & Francis, an initial fee of $10 million to make use of its content “to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems,” according to a report released in May. An Informa report published last week says the company has entered into a partnership with another company, but the report did not disclose which one.
The two reports note that Informa will explore how AI can make its internal operations more effective, specifically through Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant. “Like many, we are exploring new applications that will improve research and make it easier to analyze data, generate hypotheses, automate tasks, work across disciplines, and research ideas,” a Taylor & Francis spokesperson wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
Another publisher, Wiley, also recently agreed to sell academic content to a tech company for training AI models. The publisher completed a “GenAI content rights project” with an undisclosed “large tech company,” according to a quarterly earnings report released at the end of June. The report says another generative AI project with another unknown large tech company will be completed next year. “We are committed to ensuring that authors and societies benefit from these deals through compensation and rights protection, in accordance with existing contractual agreements,” a Wiley spokesperson told The Chronicle.
Taylor & Francis has not publicized the deal on its website, but word spread like wildfire among academics on social media after Ruth Clemens, a literary studies lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, shared news of the report on X. Her thread collected thousands of retweets and likes, as well as plenty of angry comments. “I think my tweet hit such a nerve precisely because it wasn’t made known to us researchers,” she said.
Both on social media and in interviews with The Chronicle, scholars expressed concern about their work not being cited properly or being taken out of context. They also worried about their intellectual-property rights.
Taylor & Francis told The Chronicle that detailed citation was “fundamental to the agreement.” A spokesperson for the company also said that the partnership will protect intellectual-property rights, including limits on verbatim-text reproduction. The spokesperson said content usage is “strictly controlled” and rights holders will receive royalties as outlined in their contracts.
Such reassurances are unlikely to calm professors who see these agreements as just another way their work is exploited.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb learned of the deal from Clemens’s post and shared a screenshot of her tweet on Bluesky. Like many of his peers, Kalman-Lamb, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, grounded his criticism of Taylor & Francis and its imprint Routledge’s latest business deal in the long history of unpaid labor in academe.
“This is a prototypical example of capitalism and how capitalism is predicated on exploitation,” he said. “The researcher who does the work of researching, writing, and publishing; the editors and peer reviewers, who are an integral part of the process, are performing a tremendous amount of highly skilled labor, and that labor is simply not compensated. The only ones receiving compensation are companies like Taylor & Francis and Routledge.”
Scholars have little choice but to submit to journals owned by highly profitable publishing companies, even if it means they’re contributing to an economic model they criticize. But doing so, Clemens said, “now means that I have to be interpolated into this new system of data capitalism that I’m actually quite critical of. It doesn’t feel right that I don’t have an option to opt out of that.”
Farhana Sultana, who has edited three collections with Routledge, is concerned about how her work may be repurposed, and she, too, set the news against the backdrop of unpaid academic labor. “All this occurs while our intellectual property is woefully inadequately compensated, since there is abuse and profit off our mostly free intellectual labor by private corporations reaping profits in the billions of dollars annually from the sale of our books,” Sultana, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University, told The Chronicle in an email.
They’re now taking my text and using it to contribute to this wicked system, which has no regard for human flourishing.
Bennett Gilbert thinks that the use of his work to train AI is antithetical to his teaching philosophy. Gilbert, an adjunct assistant professor of history and philosophy at Portland State University, has a “zero tolerance” policy for ChatGPT and platforms like it in his classroom because he finds the technology harmful to individual thinking and to society at large.
“They’re now taking my text and using it to contribute to this wicked system, which has no regard for human flourishing,” he said.
Authors should review their contracts to see if they hold the copyright to their works, said Umair Kazi, director of policy and advocacy at the Authors Guild, a professional organization for writers. Even if authors do not, he takes issue with the fact that these AI agreements were still made without author permission.
“When the author signed the contract, uses were not contemplated under those contracts at all,” Kazi said. “We believe that the author’s permission is still required before any company can license these rights to AI uses.”
It is typical practice in academic publishing for authors to release all rights to their work under copyright when they sign a contract with their publisher, leaving authors with little say in how their work is used. Kazi said there are still steps authors can take to protect their work. The guild has drafted a model clause that prohibits the use of a work for training AI without the author’s express permission.
Kalman-Lamb, Clemens, and Gilbert all said they would reconsider working with Taylor & Francis and its imprints in the future. “The single best weapon we have to fight exploitation in capitalism in general is labor activism — withdrawing our labor in order to put pressure on capital to bow to our own politics and positions,” Kalman-Lamb said.
