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Wiley and Oxford University Press confirm AI partnerships as Cambridge University Press offers 'opt-in'
Two further academic publishers have confirmed they have made deals with or are considering working with artificial intelligence (AI) companies a week after Taylor & Francis revealed it is set to earn £58m ($75m) from selling access to its authors’ work to AI firms.
Wiley and Oxford University Press (OUP) told The Bookseller they have confirmed AI partnerships, with the availability of opt-ins and remuneration for authors appearing to vary. In July, academics hit out at Taylor & Francis (T&F) for selling access to its authors’ research as part of a partnership with Microsoft worth $10m, with parent firm Informa’s half-year financial results later revealing that it was set to earn tens of millions from AI deals, with one additional confirmed but unnamed AI partner and future deals in the pipeline.
Taylor & Francis told The Bookseller it is "protecting the integrity of our authors’ work and limits on verbatim text reproduction, as well as authors rights to receive royalty payments in accordance with their author contracts".
Following the controversy from academics, who claim not to have been told about the Microsoft deal and claim they are not receiving any further remuneration for their work, The Bookseller subsequently asked a range of publishers across both academic and corporate, whether their authors’ work was being used for AI research.
OUP said: “We are actively working with companies developing large language models (LLMs) to explore options for both their responsible development and usage. This is not only to improve research outcomes, but to champion the vital role that researchers have in an AI-enabled world.”
A Wiley spokesperson outlined “compensation and rights protection” in conjunction with their AI work. “Wiley believes that Generative AI has the potential to transform knowledge-based industries and that it is in the public interest for these emerging technologies to be trained on high-quality, reliable information,” a spokesperson told The Bookseller.
“To this end, we have entered into two agreements to leverage select, previously published content for training these models. We are committed to ensuring that authors and societies benefit from these deals through compensation and rights protection, in accordance with existing contractual agreements.” Wiley announced a deal with an unnamed "large tech company" in June as part of its quarterly dividend. The report reads: “GenAI content rights project completed in Q4 Fiscal 2024 with large tech company; another executed GenAI project with second large tech company to be realised in Fiscal 2025.”
Meanwhile, Cambridge University Press has said it is talking to authors about opt ins along with “fair remuneration” before making any deals. “We are giving our authors and partners the choice to opt in to future licensing agreements with generative AI providers,” Mandy Hill, managing director of academic publishing at CUP said.
“We will put authors’ interests and desires first, before allowing their work to be licensed for GenAI. We believe that AI technologies have opportunities and risks for scholarly content. Where Cambridge-published content is used, it must be properly attributed, licensed, founded on permissions and with fair renumeration for both authors and publishers.”
Pearson declined to comment but chief executive Omar Abbosh did emphasise the importance of AI to the company’s growth in its half-year report this week. "Significant demographic shifts and rapid advances in AI will be important drivers of growth in education and work over the coming years, and this plays to Pearson’s strengths as a trusted provider of learning and assessment services,” he said.
The financial report also outlined engagement with its own AI study tools, with plans to launch AI tools for instructors this autumn.
Of the corporate publishers surveyed, three replied to confirm they did not sell authors work for AI. Pan Macmillan gave the most detailed response. Sara Lloyd, group communications director and global AI lead, was appointed last autumn to steer the company’s approach in this area. “We have not sold access to copyright works for AI purposes at Pan Macmillan," she told The Bookseller. "We have clear principles in relation to AI, which are published on our website. Our approach to AI is ‘people first’ and we are engaging our stakeholders with the topic in a variety of ways.
“We believe it’s vital that we achieve a balance between protection and innovation and we understand from the round-table events we’ve hosted with authors, illustrators, agents and industry bodies that using copyright works to train underlying large language models (LLMs) is a particular concern."
Hachette and HarperCollins also confirmed they had not sold any material to AI for research. “We have not sold any access for AI research," a HarperCollins spokesperson told The Bookseller. "If we were to reach an agreement to do so, we would provide authors the option of whether or not to participate.”
Lance Eaton, a higher education consultant and AI expert, predicted more scholarly publishers to sign similar data-access deals in an interview with US publication Inside Higher Ed.
He added: “What we’ve seen of AI by and large is that it’s not very good at citing or articulating what came from where and why. Here, the publisher is selling the content to an AI tool, which we don’t know how it’s going to be used, but we know they want the scholarly information. What happens to those ideas in that scholarship? How does it get used and how do people get credit for it?”
