Implications, there are a few. Trying to make sense of all of this
This blog post is an accompaniment for two recent presentations: “Not playing at the edges, welcoming disruptive change” and “A Scholarly Communication landscape scan and update” for which the slides are available.
How do we make sense of the implications of current geopolitical, financial, and technological volatility? What impact will all of this have on the relationship between libraries and publishers, and libraries and their users? This blog post is an attempt to address these questions. One thing is certain – the ground is shifting rapidly, indeed, in the weeks between making the presentations and writing this blog, multiple scenarios have changed. It is likely this will be out of date before it is published…
We live in interesting times. Major decisions, including cuts to research funding of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will have a profound impact on the amount of research being undertaken in the US. The nature of research areas and the collaborators with which US researchers work is also restricted. In the UK, a funding crisis for the higher education sector is seeing huge job losses and deep research funding cuts, again impacting the production of research.
Funding for academic libraries is being affected. In the US, the limiting of indirect costs associated with NIH grants to 15% is affecting the funding of multiple aspects of central research infrastructure, including libraries. Direct cuts are also occurring in the US with an order to place the staff of the Institute of Museum and Library Services on administrative leave, and a temporary restraining order to prevent the mass layoffs was overturned. The agency disburses congressionally appropriated funding for libraries. Library staff cuts mean that basic library activity such as the listing of journals to aid discovery is being slashed. This is affecting research work ranging from education to astronomy. In the UK, National Health Service libraries have been instructed to cut the budget for ‘core content’ by £1.7 million.
In a direct threat to a fundamental aspect of research, datasets are being deleted and removed based on political ideology. The deletions are widespread, including environmental data and academic research. The funding of the ‘absolutely indispensable resource’ of FlyBase is being cut. The library community is rallying around the collection and rescue of research datasets, housing them on open databases for researchers to use. The race is on to save climate data, policies, and other datasets.
This disruption has direct implications for academic publishers. Three institutions in the UK (Sheffield, Surrey and York) are not renewing big deals with Elsevier – the largest academic publisher – because of funding cuts. The cuts are leading to claims that transformative agreements are no longer affordable for UK institutions. Recently, a partnership of research universities in the UK has urged “fundamental reform in the way scholarly research is published, citing concerns over the financial sustainability, equity, and transparency of the current publishing system”. A drive to cut US federal spending has resulted in the cancellations of significant numbers of journals by government departmental libraries. This is leading to academic publishers ‘bracing for a slowdown’.
Despite calls that open science is one of the best responses to this uncertain environment, through defending academic freedom and by hosting open research in multiple places, it is also affected. One premier open access journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, is no longer accepting submissions as a result of the cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are concerns that support for open infrastructure will drop. In surprising, if welcome, news the NIH has accelerated the implementation date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy to 1 July this year.
Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has had its librarian fired, with serious implications for infrastructure on which libraries traditionally rely, such as the Library of Congress Authorities, which include the Subject, Name, and Title headings used in catalogues globally. The Library of Congress head of copyright has also been fired, likely due to the critical role that the Copyright Office plays in support of content providers, whose work is being hoovered up by artificial intelligence companies.
The AI shaped elephant
Amid all of this disruption, we are seeing the rapid adoption of AI into multiple aspects of the academic endeavour. Leaving aside the implications for teaching and learning, these tools are deeply affecting the way people interact with published material.
The (whole)sale of research outputs to AI companies, without compensation to, or even permission sought of, the originators of that work has opened up some other significant issues. Copyright infringements by AI companies is rife. Copyright battles are being fought with arguments from AI companies that the use of illegal sources of research materials is permissible under fair use in the process of ‘teaching’ AI large language models. As written elsewhere “the central issue remains that commercial AI companies extract significant economic value from OA content without necessarily returning value to the academic ecosystem that produced it, while at the same time disrupting academic incentive structures and attribution mechanisms”.
Large academic publishing companies are deploying AI into their own systems. Products like ProQuest Research Assistant and Scopus AI offer the ability to generate ‘literature reviews’ which seem plausible and are genuinely linked to actual published research (rather than generating hallucinations). This will be sufficient for many for the purposes of an assignment or even a paper. There appears to be no need to actually read the papers. It is possible that by choosing the short-term profit of selling their back catalogue to AI companies, publishers have inadvertently forgone the need for large swathes of people to engage with that material directly any longer.
We are seeing access statistics to university catalogues decline over the past two years. This is likely partially due to the use of AI by students. In addition, an increasing amount of research is openly available, indeed Springer are claiming 50% of their publications are now open access. Open articles can be accessed directly without the use of a library catalogue. The question of how libraries facilitate discovery in this environment is a challenging one.
The engagement with AI as a mechanism to speed up research opens up serious deeper questions about the nature of knowledge itself.
The deployment of AI in the production of information has simply exacerbated the already significant problems related to trust and integrity in scholarly communication. In the same way open access was used as a whipping boy for problems in scholarly publishing, AI is a scapegoat for research assessment. Predatory publishers have operated for at least a decade, capitalising on the ‘pay to publish’ model, and the need for academics to have multiple publications for narrow research assessment processes. Paper mills now operate at industrial scale. The situation has been described as the ‘digital erosion of intellectual integrity’, with a need for us to ‘combat truth decay’.
As one writer observed: “Academics are now being too often contacted by a robot asking if they want to review a paper which itself has been written with extensive help from AI – which no one will read in any case”. Libraries are busy, trying to work out how to provide access to material that is now in a range of locations in a range of formats. Librarians are also trying to assist their communities sift through misinformation and hallucinations.
The open alternative
Meanwhile, in a move that has been described as “a masterclass in destroying trust”, Clarivate announced in February that perpetual access to ProQuest ebooks would cease as of October 2025. There was a huge backlash from libraries as shown here, here and here. Library organisations such as SCONUL and CAUL took a stance. By March, Clarivate pushed the timeline out to 30 June 2026.
One outcome of the whole imbroglio has been a huge increase in activity around Open Educational Resources across libraries and institutions – my own being one example. This activity appears to have spooked some commercial providers, with one sending out an email headed “Supercharge Your Teaching: Say Goodbye to OER”, and linking to this infographic. They later said it had been sent in error. A second company sent an email to senior executives at institutions stating that while universities were: "encouraging faculty to adopt Open Educational Resources (OER) and other low-cost materials. … they often come with serious trade-offs for faculty—especially when free textbooks don’t align with the course structure, forcing compromises that can affect quality and clarity”, linking to this site.
So, what now?
The only thing that is clear is that things will not settle anytime soon. This is most decidedly not time to be maintaining ‘business as usual’. Libraries need to mobilise, as this piece urges: “Above all, this is a moment in which libraries must lead with intention. … waiting for clarity is not a strategy. Libraries have always been engines of access, preservation, and knowledge exchange across borders, languages, and formats”.
Reset library relationships with publishers
Increasingly, libraries are looking to speak with one voice across the globe, with the report from the 17th Berlin Open Access Conference (B17) reflecting insights from library consortia across six continents engaged in open access negotiations. The current speed of activity in the scholarly space means new questions have emerged. For example - why are we paying for ‘read’? Indeed, given the volatile nature of the market, the option of multi-year deals appears increasingly unattractive.
Supercharge our support of open infrastructure
The last item in the B17 final statement is “Fair investment realignment – Ensuring financial resources support inclusive and sustainable scholarly communication rather than disproportionately feeding profit margins”. By freeing up funds that have previously been used to support profit margin, libraries should consider redirecting acquisition funds to open infrastructure. Open access is where we should be focused – to support Open Educational Resources, Diamond Open Access publishing, and rights retention for scholarly works. It is timely that SPARC Europe has just received a two-year grant to work on Connecting the Open movements – the time is now to pull all the 'Open' tendrils together.
Redefining our role in linking readers to content?
According to the American Library Association, a library “is a collection of resources in a variety of formats that is (1) organized by information professionals or other experts who (2) provide convenient physical, digital, bibliographic, or intellectual access …" With our users taking multiple paths to content, much of which is not actually held in the library collection, we need to seriously reconsider what Discovery means in an open and artificial intelligent world.
I don’t have the answers, but we need to work out our next steps!