Good article on the consumption of scholarly articles by LLMs and how authors should think about this w/r/t open access. But it doesn't make the explicit point that CC BY NC ND (considered an OA license in most circles) could end up being a pitfall. 🧵 www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view... - ThreadSky

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madubs.bsky.social • 51 days ago

Good article on the consumption of scholarly articles by LLMs and how authors should think about this w/r/t open access. But it doesn't make the explicit point that CC BY NC ND (considered an OA license in most circles) could end up being a pitfall. 🧵
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/01/07/ai-deals-underscore-importance-open-access-opinion

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madubs.bsky.social•51 days ago

Thanks to decades of copyright transfer allowing publishers to lock away scholarly articles, AI companies now have to shell out big $ to publishers to get access to the texts to further train their models. There is no (fully legal) way around that.

madubs.bsky.social•51 days ago

But for the increasing corpus of literature that is being published OA, the outcome of fair use litigation seems to be super consequential. If LLM training is deemed fair use, then the specific license should not matter because CC licenses operate within the bounds of copyright law.

madubs.bsky.social•51 days ago

If it's not deemed fair use, well then the specific flavor of CC license attached to the work becomes critical. If AI-generated work is considered derivative, then anything with an ND tacked on could reasonably be "protected" from LLM mining.

madubs.bsky.social•51 days ago

I suspect the latter is the outcome most publishers are hoping for. And the manipulative choice architecture some of them have built to nudge authors toward CC BY NC ND could pay off in spades.

madubs.bsky.social•51 days ago

IME, journals have always been generally unwilling to change open licenses in the more permissive direction after publication, and probably for good reason - e.g., presumably, to avoid finding themselves in the middle of a legal battle about unauthorized commercial use.

madubs.bsky.social•51 days ago

But in the last year or so, I've noticed that publishers are increasingly resistant to changing licenses even in the LESS permissive direction, which is not so easily justified, except when you consider that their prospects for monetizing articles may come down to a few little letters: NC&D. /fin

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