<story><title>Academics shocked after T&amp;F sells access to their research to Microsoft AI</title><url>https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>perihelions</author><text>Information should be free. We subsidize scientific research to the tune of trillions of dollars—not to support to livelihood of grad students; not to create jobs in the publishing industry; but on the theory the fruit of that research has planet-wide benefits. We throw money hand-over-fist at scientific research because we view that as &lt;i&gt;investing in civilization&lt;/i&gt;. If we believe that, and we believe research progress builds on top of other research, then the conclusion is we ought to minimize the friction of discovering other groups&amp;#x27; research results, and maximize their availability. Make the act of research as easy and painless as possible.&lt;p&gt;Scientific research output should be free, universally, without hindrance.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s myopic to try extract wealth from this public good by siloing it, by toll-gating access to it. Like barricading a public highway with toll-booths every 500 meters: it&amp;#x27;s a myopia that&amp;#x27;s blind to the public-good value of infrastructure—a myopia of greed that&amp;#x27;s a universal drain on public wealth, for some petty local optimization.&lt;p&gt;If you obstruct ML models on some financial profit theory, you&amp;#x27;re obstructing not only the ML entities; you&amp;#x27;re obstructing the thousand researchers downstream who stand to benefit from them. You&amp;#x27;re standing the in road blocking traffic, collecting tolls; you&amp;#x27;ve not only stopped the vehicle in front of you, you&amp;#x27;ve stopped a thousand more stranded behind it. It is a public nuisance.</text></comment>
<story><title>Academics shocked after T&amp;F sells access to their research to Microsoft AI</title><url>https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carbocation</author><text>The only thing I&amp;#x27;m &amp;#x27;shocked&amp;#x27; by is the idea that anyone needs to pay to access my academic writing for model training. I would hope that using my academic writing to train models would be considered fair use.</text></comment>