As AI adoption accelerates, authors have growing concerns over maintaining control of their own work that may reduce their willingness to share their research openly. Publisher licensing deals with AI companies and instances of these same companies using scholarly content without permission have raised serious questions over consent and the potential exploitation of academic works. This has prompted some authors to reconsider how they share their publications and whether to license them openly. Attribution requirements—a fundamental element of open access and open licenses—provide both a way for authors to retain credit for their contributions and a mechanism for addressing faculty concerns.

On May 29th from 1-2pm ET / 10-11am PT, SPARC will host a conversation on how attribution can better align AI tool development with both authors’ interests and the public good. The discussion will touch on the need for mechanisms integrating more accurate citations into AI tools, the ways this would positively impact authors, and implications for authors when considering whether to make their work openly available.

The webcast will feature a brief presentation by Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar (Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University) of their publication, “AI Search Has A Citation Problem,” followed by a facilitated discussion with Dave Hansen (Authors Alliance), and Peter Suber (Harvard University).

This webcast is open to those working in SPARC member libraries, and you can register here.

Speaker: Dave Hansen, Executive Director, Author’s Alliance

Who owns the copyright in scholarly work has been one of the most confusing, yet most important, legal questions in the move toward open access. While the answer might seem like it should be obvious (“authors!”), the reality is that layers of university copyright policies, copyright’s “work for hire” doctrine, publisher copyright transfer agreements, and funder licensing requirements make this a complex issue.

This session will address how these different layers of rights, copyright transfers, and licenses affect the ability of authors and their institutions to make their works available openly as well as emerging issues such as AI usage of scholarly works and how open licensing and copyright can support or inhibit those uses.

Recordings of each session will be made available afterward. These sessions are intended to provide lightweight professional development for librarians whose work intersects with open access or may do so in the future.

These sessions are open to anyone working in libraries, and participants can register here. SPARC membership is NOT required, and our goal in this series is to support the wider community, particularly those at institutions with fewer resources to support OA-related work.

Speakers: Matt Ruen, Head of Collections and Digital Scholarship, Grand Valley State University; Teresa Schultz, Scholarly Communication and Social Sciences Librarian, University of Nevada Reno

“Predatory” publishing, which generally refers to a set of practices in academic publishing aimed at deception for financial gain at the expense of rigor, remains a hot topic among researchers and scholarly communication specialists. There are disagreements on how to define it and to whom and what it applies. This session will explore a variety of publishing practices that could be considered predatory - including ones that are applicable to well established subscription publishers and journals - and problems with lists that claim to make clear-cut decisions on "good" and "bad" journals. Finally, we’ll discuss how librarians can help researchers evaluate scholarly journals based on their needs.

Recordings of each session will be made available afterward. These sessions are intended to provide lightweight professional development for librarians whose work intersects with open access or may do so in the future.

These sessions are open to anyone working in libraries, and participants can register here. SPARC membership is NOT required, and our goal in this series is to support the wider community, particularly those at institutions with fewer resources to support OA-related work.

Session recording is available here.

Speaker: Rachel Borchardt, Scholarly Communication Librarian, American University

There are many visibility and impact benefits associated with publishing open access research, but researchers do not always prioritize open access when disseminating research. However, visibility and impact are vital to researchers, as well as grant funders and research institutions. In this webinar, we’ll discuss the relationships between open access and impact, starting with traditional scholarly impact metrics and moving into other types of impact, as well as the current landscape of research promotion and visibility. Aligning open access advocacy with researcher incentives as well as recent impact initiatives and movements will also be discussed.

Recordings of each session will be made available afterward. These sessions are intended to provide lightweight professional development for librarians whose work intersects with open access or may do so in the future.

These sessions are open to anyone working in libraries. SPARC membership is NOT required, and our goal in this series is to support the wider community, particularly those at institutions with fewer resources to support OA-related work.