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SPARC Webcast: OA, Attribution, and Addressing Faculty AI Concerns
May 2025 | Link to Recording
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 29, 2025, SPARC held a conversation on how attribution can better align AI tool development with both authors’ interests and the public good. The discussion touched 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 featured 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).
OA 101: Problematizing “Predatory” Publishing
May 2025 | Link to Recording
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 explores 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.
OA 101: Open Access, Visibility, and Research Impact – An Introduction
April 2025 | Link to Recording
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.