Charles W. Bailey, Jr. – Page 11

"The AI Copyright Hype: Legal Claims That Didn’t Hold Up"

Over the past year, two dozen AI-related lawsuits and their myriad infringement claims have been winding their way through the court system. None have yet reached a jury trial. While we all anxiously await court rulings that can inform our future interaction with generative AI models, in the past few weeks, we are suddenly flooded by news reports with titles such as “US Artists Score Victory in Landmark AI Copyright Case,” “Artists Land a Win in Class Action Lawsuit Against A.I. Companies,” “Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators”—and the list goes on. The exuberant mood in these headlines mirror the enthusiasm of people actually involved in this particular case (Andersen v. Stability AI). The plaintiffs’ lawyer calls the court’s decision “a significant step forward for the case.” “We won BIG,” writes the plaintiff on X.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the reality behind these headlines and statements. The “BIG” win in fact describes a portion of the plaintiffs’ claims surviving a pretrial motion to dismiss. If you are already familiar with the motion to dismiss per Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 12(b)(6), please refer to Part II to find out what types of claims have been dismissed early on in the AI lawsuits.

https://tinyurl.com/rhmzkr8y

Digital Archivist at Old Dominion University

The Digital Archivist is responsible for creating and implementing digital preservation plans, engaging in digital curation and collection development, supporting the Libraries’ digital collections platform(s), creating and providing guidance on metadata for digital materials, and providing access to Old Dominion University’s digital collections. The Digital Archivist administers and prioritizes multiple projects and tasks to meet the goals of the Digital Collections Program, including training, and supervising student employees and interns to assist with program activities.

https://jobs.odu.edu/postings/21423

"Impact Factor Does Not Predict Long-Term Article Impact across 15 Journals"

Authors who publish in journals with higher impact factors are deemed to contribute more to their discipline. However, the impact factor of a journal does not indicate how long a specific article stays in the scientific discourse, and metrics that measure the length of time articles within a journal continue to be cited are not typically used. We examined citations of 443,732 research articles [786,064 total] between 1980 and 2020 across 15 journals. We explored the range of longevity values found across different journals as well as the relationship between impact factor and longevity. We found no relationship between impact factor and longevity, indicating that immediate attention to an article is not correlated with longer-term impact. . . .

For early-career scholars, the implications of citation longevity can be meaningful. Our data suggest that a new faculty member publishing primarily in strong society journals has yet to reach their full impact by mid-career milestones such as applying for tenure and promotion. The total contribution of the work to the field will likely not be seen until after their career is finished. . . .

The results presented here have important implications for journal selection and evaluation of science academics. For example, early career researchers may benefit from publishing in lower-impact, higher-longevity journals because their work may become classic within their field when they reach full promotion. Additionally, hiring and promotion committees should consider giving journals with higher longevity scores more weight among early career researchers, as these works can potentially impact departmental rankings over the long run. Furthermore, funding agencies and university review committees could benefit from a holistic analysis of academic productivity by examining article and journal performance metrics over time along with traditional indicators, such as altmetrics (Fortin et al., 2021), impact factor, and total citations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dim.2024.100079

Manager of AI Modeling & Inference at Stanford University

Stanford University Libraries’ Research Data Services is seeking an experienced, technically-adept, forward-thinking library professional to both lead and directly contribute programming effort to our new AI Modeling & Inference group. This role manages two Digital Scholarship Research Developers, leading a group with significant accomplishments in digital humanities projects. . . .

This role is a member of the management team in Research Data Services, a patron-facing group at Stanford University Libraries supporting geospatial research data, research data curation, data infrastructure, and academic data support. Due to the relevance of modeling & inference across many domains, we expect this position to play a crucial role in articulating AI research methods across other parts of RDS. Examples of this might include text recognition on historic maps, vector-space models for reconciling text in a curation context, or re-training Large Language Models on specific historic or literary corpora.

https://tinyurl.com/58uzepc7

"Is Open Access Disrupting the Journal Business? A Perspective from Comparing Full Adopters, Partial Adopters, and Non-adopters"

This study employs the concept of disruptive innovation to develop a more systematic perspective on the impact of OA. It compares the market power of full-OA adopters with that of partial adopters and non-adopters. Using Lerner’s definition of market power, a series of mean difference tests and regressions were conducted using Lerner’s definition of market power. The findings reveal that both full-OA adopters and partial adopters exhibit greater market power than non-adopters. However, full adopters do not have more market power than partial adopters, even when compared to the subscription options of hybrid journals. This suggests that OA disrupts the market power of both incumbents and traditional businesses. Nevertheless, the situation changes once incumbents integrate an OA option into their publishing repertoire and transition to a hybrid model.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2024.101574

DigitalKoans Posts Resume on 9/10/2024

DigitalKoans Posts will resume on 9/10/2024.

Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities, 2000-2024: Marketing and Communications Challenges and Opportunities

This book explores the recent history and future directions of scholarly publishing in the humanities in the United States from a marketing and communications perspective. The study draws on statistical surveys and data from a multidude of sources in order to analyze the major challenges confronting the humanities in higher education as well as the opportunities for print and digital publication since 2000. Chapters cover all types of publishing from university to trade presses, libraries, national programs, and self publishing, and focuses on changes in higher education funding, the impact of disruptive technologies such as AI, and the importance of global markets in disseminating new research in the humanities.

https://tinyurl.com/25m3abwu

"Tweeting and Retweeting Scientific Articles: Implications for Altmetrics"

Despite differences in extent of engagement of users, original tweets and retweets to scientific publications are considered as equal events. Current research investigates quantifiable differences between tweets and retweets from an altmetric point of view. Twitter users, text, and media content of two datasets, one containing 742 randomly selected tweets and retweets (371 each) and another with 5898 tweets and retweets (about 3000 each), all linking to scientific articles published on PLoS ONE, were manually categorized. Results from analyzing the proportions of tweets and retweets indicated that academic and individual accounts produce majority of original tweets (34% and 55%, respectively) and posted significantly larger proportion of retweets (41.5 and 81%). Bot accounts, on the other hand, had posted significantly more original tweets (20%) than retweets (2%). Natural communication sentences prevailed in retweets and tweets (63% vs. 45%) as well as images (41.5% vs. 23%), both showing a significant rise in usage overtime. Overall, the findings suggest that the attention scientific articles receive on Twitter may have more to do with human interaction and inclusion of visual content in the tweets, than the significance of or genuine interest towards the research results.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05127-8

"What Needs to be Learned by U.S. Cultural Heritage Professionals? Results from the Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network"

With the current proliferation of training opportunities available in digital preservation, this study asks: what are the most in demand digital preservation instruction topics? To answer this question, we did a qualitative content analysis of 168 Professional Development Support applications received by the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N) between September 2020 and December 2023. The study finds that the management of digital records and metadata/cataloging standards were the most requested training topics, and that general and broadly applicable skills tend to be the most sought after. This indicates that there is a continuing need to provide education focusing on the core elements of digital preservation and knowledge, and that we have not moved on yet to a place where cultural heritage professionals are solely seeking skills in more advanced or specialized digital preservation topics.

https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2024-0024

"AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data"

Yet, although current LLMs. . ., including GPT-3, were trained on predominantly human-generated text, this may change. If the training data of most future models are also scraped from the web, then they will inevitably train on data produced by their predecessors. In this paper, we investigate what happens when text produced by, for example, a version of GPT forms most of the training dataset of following models. . . .

Model collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models, in which the data they generate end up polluting the training set of the next generation. Being trained on polluted data, they then mis-perceive reality. . . .

In our work, we demonstrate that training on samples from another generative model can induce a distribution shift, which—over time—causes model collapse. This in turn causes the model to mis-perceive the underlying learning task. To sustain learning over a long period of time, we need to make sure that access to the original data source is preserved and that further data not generated by LLMs remain available over time. The need to distinguish data generated by LLMs from other data raises questions about the provenance of content that is crawled from the Internet: it is unclear how content generated by LLMs can be tracked at scale. One option is community-wide coordination to ensure that different parties involved in LLM creation and deployment share the information needed to resolve questions of provenance. Otherwise, it may become increasingly difficult to train newer versions of LLMs without access to data that were crawled from the Internet before the mass adoption of the technology or direct access to data generated by humans at scale.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

Access & Systems Librarian at Roseman University of Health Sciences

Serve as system administrator for the library’s integrated library system (ILS); including troubleshooting issues, overseeing updates, maintaining vendor relations, patron account management, resolving data discrepancies, providing reports, and overseeing library staff training

Oversee the maintenance, configuration, and troubleshooting of other library systems including the institutional repository, interlibrary loan software, library guides, and the library website

Promote Roseman University research through management and growth of the institutional repository system

https://tinyurl.com/2wbt33z3

"Interview: Deciphering the Law: Hachette v. Internet Archive Pt. 1 (2023) with Dave Hansen"

This is the first in a series of interviews with those closely tied to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit. In March 2023, the court ruled against the Internet Archive and its use of the Emergency Lending Library causing a ripple throughout the library and education fields. Below, find the answers to some of the questions that the case elicited by JCEL contributors and copyright scholars Dave Hansen, Michelle Wu, and Kyle Courtney.

https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v7i2.21337

Library DevOps Engineer II at Princeton University

In this role, you will leverage your knowledge of servers, storage, virtualization, application administration, security frameworks, and the academic Library domain to verify that Princeton maintains its reputation as a national and international leader in the development of digital repositories and access systems which are integral to preserving and making available the scholarly record at a complex institution such as Princeton. You will collaborate with DevOps and Library Software Engineer team members to determine technical requirements and automation strategies for our on premise infrastructure containing virtual hosts running over three hundred (300) virtual machines in our test, staging, and production environments.

https://tinyurl.com/ywpbprfp

"Director of University of Texas Libraries and Open Access Champion Lorraine Haricombe Announces Retirement"

Lorraine J. Haricombe, an innovating leader in academic libraries, has announced her retirement as Director and Vice Provost of the University of Texas Libraries, marking the conclusion of a distinguished career spanning decades. . . .

Among her many achievements, she expanded the development of Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository, which has significantly enhanced the accessibility and impact of the university’s scholarly output. Haricombe also championed the implementation of advanced data management services, providing critical support for the university’s research community in managing, preserving, and sharing their data. . . . .

One of Haricombe’s most notable accomplishments as a library leader was her advocacy in advancing open access initiatives. She played a key role in the establishment of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Working Group, which has been instrumental in reducing the cost of educational materials for students and promoting the adoption of OER across the campus. . . .

Before her tenure at The University of Texas at Austin, Haricombe served as the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas from 2006 to 2015. At Kansas, she was a driving force behind the implementation of the university’s open access policy, making it one of the first public universities in the United States to adopt such a policy.

https://tinyurl.com/2296efah

Data and Immersive Visualization Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries

As a member of a team of professionals in the Digital Scholarship Lab, the Data and Immersive Visualization Librarian will be a key contributor to the MSU Libraries’ services and programs for data visualization, immersive technologies, and digital scholarship. Collaborating with colleagues across the Libraries, this position provides consultation services and designs programming that orient patrons to the transformative capabilities of data visualization tools and immersive technologies for teaching, learning, and research. The Data and Immersive Visualization Librarian will contribute to rich, well-developed communities at MSU that are experimenting with data visualization tools, XR/AR/MR/VR, gaming, and other immersive technologies.

https://tinyurl.com/ncdr3jvz

"Summary of User Rights Network Symposium: Protecting Copyright User Rights from Contractual Override "

In this paper, Benson, Blumenthal, and Klosek summarize the proceedings of the public symposium on the “Protection of Copyright User Rights from Contractual Override.” The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)—together, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA)—sponsored the symposium in partnership with the American University Washington College of Law Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). The paper includes summaries of each panel, questions that were discussed, and takeaways for the library community to consider.

https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v7i2.20856

Technology Development Librarian at Emory University

Reporting to the Director of the Library, the Technology Development Librarian (TDL) is responsible for supporting, updating, and developing software used in the ongoing research and access agenda of Pitts Theology Library, a unit of Candler School of Theology. . . . The current portfolio of library technologies includes WordPress, OmekaS, Opensolr, Quire, and Reclaim Hosting. . . . The TDL will also play a key role in project teams that leverage digital technology to provide access for library patrons, enhance research on library collections, and allow collaboration between the library and its various constituencies.

https://tinyurl.com/4n72bxff

Paywall: British Library: "User-Centred Collecting for Emerging Formats"

This paper provides an overview of the work conducted at legal deposit libraries to better understand access requirements for emerging formats, from a user’s perspective and with a focus on web-based interactive narratives. . . . It also considers how existing tools and methodologies, such as web archiving, can be adapted and built to support the collection of emerging formats. Finally, it delves into different research projects conducted at the British Library around archiving and performing quality assurance for interactive narratives, collecting contextual information, and lessons learnt from exhibiting born-digital content in a physical space.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2024.2389101

Associate College Librarian & Coordinator for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications at Haverford College

The ACL serves as a member of the Libraries’ leadership team and participates in strategic planning. The ACL leads the overall collections program, discipline-specific responsibility for which is distributed among subject librarians. The ACL manages the collections budget, generates reports and forecasts, and negotiates licenses for e-resources. The ACL provides vision and leadership for the Libraries’ open access strategies and supports open publishing among Haverford scholars. The ACL administers Haverford’s repository of faculty publications and develops best practices for showcasing faculty scholarship.

https://tinyurl.com/yc5c5s2c

"An Analysis of the Impact of Gold Open Access Publications in Computer Science"

There has been some concern about the impact of predatory publishers on scientific research for some time. Recently, publishers that might previously have been considered `predatory’ have established their bona fides, at least to the extent that they are included in citation impact scores such as the field-weighted citation impact (FWCI). These are sometimes called ‘grey’ publishers (MDPI, Frontiers, Hindawi). In this paper, we show that the citation landscape for these grey publications is significantly different from the mainstream landscape and that affording publications in these venues the same status as publications in mainstream journals may significantly distort metrics such as the FWCI.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10262

Geospatial Specialist / Librarian at University of Arizona

The Geospatial Specialist / Librarian will develop an interdisciplinary service program supporting the geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial data needs of the UA research and instruction communities. . . . The Geospatial Specialist / Librarian will: stay abreast of trends and tools available in the evolving geospatial data ecosystem; provide technical support and training in the use of tools and workflows to support GIS applications; develop skill in and apply pedagogical best practices in data and computational instruction; work with library colleagues and researchers to identify appropriate tools, platforms, and resources for geospatial projects; collaborate with other members of the Data Cooperative and Research Engagement to develop outreach strategies and partnerships; work with members of the Libraries’ Technical Services and Support (TeSS) department in support of infrastructure for discovery and access of the Libraries’ geospatial digital assets; collaborate with Research Engagement and TeSS departments on curation and metadata management for geospatial digital assets.

https://tinyurl.com/47vc2tyk

Paywall: "Application-Based Big Data Development Framework for Health Sciences Libraries"

It presents a theoretical framework of the performance-based evaluation system for health institutes’ libraries in the digital environment. The health sciences libraries’ systematic approach was judged based on the five main components (data culture, organisational infrastructure, responsibilities, skills and technology competence) of big data analytics (BDA). . . . The study proposed a need for skilled professionals with the knowledge and experience both professionally and technically. Finally, the study proposed a model that will help to measure the organisation’s ability to analyse vast amounts of data to empirically validate the association concerning big data analysis and analytical practices in health libraries.

https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12545

Librarian for Electronic Resources at Pepperdine University

The Librarian for Electronic Resources manages the acquisition, access, and renewal of electronic resources, ensuring seamless and reliable access for all users. This role involves analyzing usage data to inform collection development, negotiating license agreements, and maintaining accurate metadata to ensure that Pepperdine Libraries’ resources meet the ever-changing needs of the university’s academic community.

https://tinyurl.com/jd4mucub

Paywall: "Research on the Generation Mechanism and Action Mechanism of Scientific Data Reuse Behavior"

Specifically, this study takes scientific data reuse attitudes as a breakthrough to discuss the factors that influence researchers’ scientific data reuse attitudes and the extent to which these factors influence scientific data reuse behaviors. It also further explores the impact of scientific data reuse behavior on research and innovation performance and the moderating effect of scientific data services on scientific data reuse behavior.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102921

Electronic Resources and Discovery Librarian at Seattle University

Seattle University’s Lemieux Library and McGoldrick Learning Commons seeks a creative and collaborative Electronic Resources and Discovery Librarian to manage and support the entire lifecycle of electronic resources (databases, ejournals, ebooks, streaming media) including acquisition, licensing review, troubleshooting and assessment.

https://tinyurl.com/246kf384