Scholarly Books – DigitalKoans

“ARL Supports Senator Wyden’s Call for FTC Action on Digital Ownership Rights”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined a letter by Public Knowledge supporting US Senator Ron Wyden’s February 25, 2025, request for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intervention to protect consumer rights in digital marketplaces. . . .

Senator Wyden highlighted a critical issue: consumers who “purchase” digital materials like ebooks are actually only acquiring temporary access licenses, often with significant usage restrictions. Libraries must accept these restrictions when licensing essential databases and digital resources for education and scholarship. For instance, in some cases publishers have retroactively banned AI research applications through impromptu contract addendums—even after the library and publisher signed license agreements.

ARL joins the American Library Association (ALA), Software Preservation Network (SPN), University Information Policy Offers (UIPO), Public Knowledge (PK), and other library and civil society groups in signing the letter supporting Senator Wyden’s request.

https://tinyurl.com/ywbambsx

“Guest Post: Eight Hypotheses Why Librarians Don’t Like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)”

Content providers are starting to silo their collections in order to restrict other RAG-based tools from accessing their content.

An example: in the case of Primo Research Assistant, collections from APA (and others such as Elsevier and JSTOR) are excluded from result generation. This would need to be explained to students and faculty using the tool, which adds considerably to the time and energy put into the communication needed to make these tools worth their licensing cost. It can reasonably be assumed that almost all content providers are going to invest in their own AI assistants or make licensing deals with existing ones. How many of these can and should we license and maintain? Librarians working on discovery layers should start making plans now for identifying the tools that best serve their community and how their workflows need to change.

https://tinyurl.com/2fe6hdnw

“Wiley and Perplexity Announce New AI Search Partnership”

This new collaboration will allow Perplexity users, including college students, educators and researchers at institutions that subscribe to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro to access purchased Wiley educational collections and resources in areas such as nursing, business, and engineering. This includes streamlined access to specialized Wiley collections, giving users a new pathway to discover and interact with authoritative resources across many academic domains. Students will also gain tools for responsible AI usage, reinforcing Wiley’s commitment to supporting academic integrity. . . .

Perplexity provides live web access and Wiley collections content with sourced citations, ensuring users receive up-to-date information with proper attribution. Students, educators, and researchers can get answers sourced across Wiley and web sources, combining the authoritative nature of Wiley with the most recent developments from the web.

Among the pilot users of this new offering are Texas A&M and Texas State University, with several universities in the United Kingdom poised to start soon.

https://tinyurl.com/yc8xy5cf

“Duke University Press to Publish Open Access Monographs through MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O)”

The MIT Press is proud to announce that beginning in 2026, Duke University Press will join our Direct to Open (D2O) program. This collaboration marks the first such partnership with another university press for the D2O program, and reaffirms our shared commitment to open access publishing that is ethical, equitable, and sustainable. . . .

Duke University Press brings their distinguished catalog in the humanities and social sciences to Direct to Open, providing open access to 20 frontlist titles annually alongside the MIT Press’s 80 scholarly books each year. Their participation in the D2O program—which will also include free term access to a paywalled collection of 250 key backlist titles—enhances the range of openly available academic content for D2O’s library partners. . . .

With Duke University Press’s involvement in 2026, D2O will feature multiple package options, combining content from both the MIT Press and Duke University Press. Participating institutions will have the opportunity to support each press individually, providing flexibility for libraries while fostering collective impact.

https://tinyurl.com/46ecywyr

“Springer Nature Donates Its Unique AI Tool That Identifies Problematic Text to Publishing Community”

Following the successful rollout across its journals and books of its AI tool that detects cases of AI-generated nonsense text in research manuscripts, Springer Nature is now donating the tool to STM. It will be integrated into the STM Integrity Hub, an industry-wide initiative that supports publishers in ensuring the integrity of their published content, as part of its mission to develop and trial tools that publishers large and small can use to screen submissions for indicators of compromised content. . . .

The tool has already been responsible for identifying hundreds of fake papers soon after submission, preventing them from being published and taking up editors’ and peer reviewers’ valuable time. in addition, the tool provides a gateway to identifying a larger cohort of problematic submissions. Connections between the original papers and other content, for example as part of the same special issue, can be found, leading to the identification of papers that, at first sight, appear robust but, upon more rigorous analysis, are in fact problematic. Data from all these papers feed into Springer Nature’s wider investigations and help to keep out compromised content.

https://tinyurl.com/ye29nhfw

“ProQuest – New Ebook Central AI Tool Helps Users Engage Deeper with Scholarly Ebooks”

The Ebook Central Research Assistant simplifies book exploration by identifying key concepts and providing contextual explanations to enhance understanding. With chapter-level insights and key term definitions drawn directly from the text, it keeps users engaged in their research. Powered by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it ensures accuracy by sourcing insights directly from the book’s content. Additionally, it helps users discover related titles within their library’s Ebook Central collection, seamlessly expanding their research scope. Features at launch include:

Key Takeaways: Chapter-level insights help users assess content relevance efficiently

Concept Highlights: Identification and explanation of key terms, with one-click searches, deepen research

https://tinyurl.com/49kwvajd

“New STM Draft Report: Classifying AI Use in Manuscript Preparation”

While publishers have long offered guidance on disclosing human assistance—such as language editing—recent advances in generative AI have significantly expanded the ways in which machine tools can support manuscript preparation. From writing and editing to generating images and diagrams, the use of AI in scholarly publishing is evolving rapidly. . . .

This lack of consistent standards risks undermining trust in scholarly communication. To support the integrity of the academic record, the draft classification offers a clear framework to help publishers define, evaluate, and guide the transparent use of AI in manuscript preparation in the context of their individual editorial processes.

https://tinyurl.com/2druekkw

DigitalKoans and Digital Scholarship Have Been Published for 20 Years

Established on May 20, 2005, DigitalKoans and Digital Scholarship are now 20 years old.

Digital Scholarship was established by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8453-4402), who has been an open access publisher since 1989 when he launched The Public-Access Computer Systems Review—one of the first peer-reviewed diamond open access journals on the Internet. Digital Scholarship's digital publications are open access and are licensed under variations of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Since inception, DigitalKoans has published over 17,200 posts, including over 6,100 job ads, and Digital Scholarship has had over 16.2 million nonunique visitors (excluding spiders).

Digital Scholarship primarily publishes scholarly works on these topics:

“Portico to Preserve Clarivate’s Ebook Central”

Portico has signed an agreement with Clarivate to preserve books available to academic libraries through Ebook Central. This agreement ensures the long-term preservation of this expansive collection. Portico will also receive new books added to Ebook Central in the future.

https://librarytechnology.org/pr/31206

“A Master Class in Destroying Trust”

Clarivate’s dismissal of one-time purchases is alarming, but when you consider the company’s larger strategy, it makes sense. On the Q4 earnings call, Shem Tov refers to one-time purchases as “a drain.” He also says that Clarivate has “retained financial advisers to help us in evaluating strategic alternatives to unlock value. This may include divesting business units or an entire segment.” He goes on to say, “There is no guarantee that anything actionable will arise from this process,” but considering Clarivate will no longer sell books, Clarivate’s furthering its investment in data should make us wary.

https://tinyurl.com/y57tdkz3

“Making an Open Information Literacy Textbook: A Case Study in OER Collaborations Among Four Oklahoma Academic Librarians”

Springboarding from a statewide initiative, four academic librarians from three different universities collaborated to create an openly licensed textbook on the Pressbooks platform that could be easily embedded into one-shots or general education research courses. The project developed over the span of a year, which included: planning, exploring, creating, evaluating, sharing, and implementing. The first three steps taught the authors to set and agree upon shared expectations early, decide to either clone or create original content, and trust remixing material from other OER is firmly within the moral framework of sharing knowledge. In the final three stages the authors learned to recruit more reviewers/editors than needed, recognize when to turn off perfectionism and publish, and stay open to new collaborative opportunities. The authors experienced firsthand how OER transforms libraries from information gate-keepers to become content owners. This transformation brings libraries closer to their missions of access for all.

https://doi.org/10.33011/newlibs/18/2

“Elsevier Launches Sciencedirect AI to Transform Research with Rapid Mission-Critical Insights from Trusted Content”

ScienceDirect AI includes the following features:

Ask ScienceDirect AI – search and summaries of full-text articles and book chapters

Users can search and get answers from within the full-text of 14 million articles and book chapters, using their own words to describe what they need and why. ScienceDirect AI will search across the millions of documents in its index to provide a Summary Response with references, Source Snippets for each reference, and short Related Insights summaries while linking back to the original document.

Reading Assistant – chat with a document in ScienceDirect

This conversational feature answers questions about the content of a specific full-text article or book chapter and allows researchers to ask further questions of the document. Users can click on references within the summaries to jump to locations in the article where the answer comes from, it also suggests research questions.

Compare Experiments – experiment summary table

Comparing and synthesizing literature can be very time-consuming. ScienceDirect AI’s unique Compare Experiments tool takes a set of articles and creates a table breaking down each experiment within them, drawing out the key aspects of each including goals, methods and results.

https://tinyurl.com/mwnkar8u

Clarivate: “Our Letter to the Library Community”

After receiving feedback and guidance from our customers and partners, we would like to further clarify our intentions moving forward:

We remain unequivocally committed to preserving perpetual access to previously purchased Ebook Central titles.

We are committed to increased investment in Rialto as an ebook marketplace, enabling title-by-title ebook purchasing from publishers and other vendors.

We will work with vendors, such as EBSCO, to integrate with their book and purchasing platforms, to maximize choice and workflow efficiency for customers.

We will expand benchmark and collection development tools in Rialto, providing you with insights to more efficiently make book selection, purchase and access decisions.

To further support the changes announced:

We will extend the ability for customers to make perpetual purchases for both print and ebooks on all platforms, including Ebook Central, OASIS, Rialto and GOBI through June 30, 2026.

We reaffirm our commitment to always facilitate title-by-title perpetual access purchasing through the Rialto marketplace of ebooks from publishers and aggregators.

We will work with you and your vendors of choice to create migration toolkits, to make transitioning your workflows and profiles as efficient and seamless as possible.

We will provide the data and analytics you need, as well as regular updates and close communication with your local team.

https://tinyurl.com/9hbuheru

“AI Is Reigniting Decades-Old Questions Over Digital Rights, but Fair Use Prevails”

A publisher recently provided UC Berkeley’s Library with an elusive explanation for their AI ban on a subset of their licensed materials, claiming that they would “require new and different AI terms [that] would be significantly higher in price,” and that “individual client requests [would] need to be evaluated [to] determine whether or not they will be permitted.” However, when prompted to provide said new terms and price, the publisher was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide any additional information, noting that there is “no set pricing model or terms to share.” . . .

Charging extra to secure AI rights is likely to be cost-prohibitive due to increased financial burdens on libraries and institutions of higher education; if publishers are successful, it could lead to less academic output as researchers may have to independently foot the bill for the right to conduct research using AI.

https://tinyurl.com/42nmfwm2

“Clarivate Unveils Transformative Subscription-Based Access Strategy for Academia”

The new strategy includes the introduction of two market-leading solutions that are now available.

ProQuest Ebooks offers. . . .

Over 700,000 Ebooks, across 10 core disciplines, plus additional essential interdisciplinary titles. . . .

The addition of Ebook Central Research Assistant, a powerful new AI tool designed to enhance student learning and streamline research.

ProQuest Digital Collections offers . . . .

Over 160 million primary source items complemented by over 2,500 full-text scholarly journals, more than 24,000 video titles, and 15 million audio tracks. . . .

[A]ccess to nine ProQuest One discipline solutions including Anthropology, Entertainment & Popular Culture, Global Studies & International Relations, History, Literature, Performing Arts, Visual Arts & Design. . . .

As part of this transformative strategy and following changes in demand from libraries, Clarivate will also phase out one-time perpetual purchases of digital collections, print and digital books for libraries. These transitions will take place throughout 2025, in close co-operation with customers.

https://tinyurl.com/3mtsr3kr

How Can We Achieve Sustainable Funding for Open Access Books?”

Is the biggest blocker to open access (OA) for books actually the economics of it all? Book processing charges (BPCs) do not scale but they remain a significant method of paying to produce OA monographs for many researchers and libraries. However, in the last few years, we have seen several new initiatives emerge that seek to solve the problem posed by funding via BPCs alone. There is a proliferation of collective funding models for OA books, including Opening the Future, Open Book Collective, MIT Press’s D2O, JSTOR’s Path to Open and others. They all work differently, but they all offer alternatives to BPCs. In this article we explore the theme of sustainable funding for OA monographs, presenting a range of new models, and suggest that their normalization is well overdue. We also present the work of the library at Lancaster University on their new strategy supporting open access. While this article takes a somewhat UK-centric path, what is happening in the UK may be replicated in other countries and contexts. With demand increasing for monographs to be open this is a timely topic. The authors welcome discussion from publishers, libraries and other stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.673

“Staffing of Library Publishing Programs in the United States and Canada: A Data-Driven Analysis”

Introduction: Using the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) Research Dataset, this paper focuses on the staffing of library publishing programs at colleges, universities, and consortia in the United States and Canada from 2014 to 2022.

Methods: In order to transform the data into a consistent format and write it into a single table as a commaseparated values (CSV) file, we created a program written in C# and executed on Windows 10. We narrowed the data set to focus on just library publishing programs from the United States and Canada, as well as to those that responded to the survey in early and later years. We also analyzed the data by enrollment and compared the staffing of library publishing programs to the staffing of academic libraries in general using the annual Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Library Trends and Statistics Annual Survey data.

Results: The average library publishing program relies largely on professional staff, has shown the most growth in paraprofessional staff, and has lost staff overall since 2019 while still showing growth overall since data collection began. Discussion: Compared with staffing of ACRL libraries in general, library publishing programs lost staff members at about a four-times higher rate from 2014 to 2021.

Conclusion: From 2014 to 2022, the number of library publishing staff did not grow at the same rate as the number of staff in libraries did as a whole. Also, although there are certainly general conclusions or trends, there are also opportunities for additional quantitative and qualitative research to be done in this area.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.17755

"How Has the Field Changed in the Last 10 Years? An Excerpt from the 2024 Library Publishing Directory"

In this year’s edition of the Directory, we received responses from 179 publishers in 18 countries, and 167 long-form responses are featured in the Directory. The number of respondents has grown gradually since the first Library Publishing Directory in 2014, when 116 library publishers completed the survey. We also see a much higher number in the unique institutions that have participated in the last decade: in the Directory‘s lifetime 383 library programs have responded to the call for entries. Most respondents (92%) represent academic libraries, which is consistent with previous years. Of the remaining respondents, 5% identified their institution type as consortia, 1% as member organizations, and 2% as other.

https://tinyurl.com/kf8w3fp5

"How Librarians are Advancing Open Book Publishing at the Lever Press"

At an October 2010 meeting of the Oberlin Group, a consortium of over 80 liberal arts college libraries in the United States, one of us (BG) made an audacious proposal: that the Oberlin Group establish an open access press, devoted to the production of peer-reviewed books, rigorously edited and distributed in electronic form without fees. . . .

Fourteen years later, the Lever Press is thriving as the publisher of digital-first diamond open-access monographs on topics of interest to the liberal arts. Lever presents a unique model for how libraries, especially those from smaller institutions, can help transform the open-access landscape.

https://tinyurl.com/9hwpa2bp

"Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft"

Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. The dataset was created by Harvard’s newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

https://tinyurl.com/ymen65js

"The Open Monograph Distribution and Acquisitions Gap: A Look at TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) Titles"

The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) network of universities, and the open access (OA) monographs that have been funded and published through this program, provide a unique opportunity to study the work done by university presses and academic libraries to distribute and acquire this content. TOME is a program that supports university presses’ publication of OA monographs through locally funded subventions. Though the works have been published by universities, and the subvention programs that make them OA have largely involved the funding institution libraries in the process, the resulting OA works are not easily discoverable or accessible through library systems. Because it is so highly distributed across many academic institutions, the TOME collection of OA monograph titles offers the opportunity for libraries and publishers to more closely examine the process of creating OA content and provides the chance to study how we collectively make these works discoverable and accessible to our communities and more broadly in the world as well. The analysis presented in this paper offers insights into developing and refining procedures and management strategies at libraries participating in TOME. These recommendations provide insights into discovery of and access to OA monographs in general.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15492

"Intelligent Summaries: Will Artificial Intelligence Mark the Finale for Biomedical Literature Reviews?"

Manuscripts that only flatly summarize knowledge in a field could become superfluous, as AI-powered systems will become better and better at generating more comprehensive and updated summaries automatically. Furthermore, the use of A.I. technologies in data analysis and synthesis will greatly reduce human tasks, enabling more efficient and timely production of preliminary findings. What kind of reviews will still find room in an academic journal? It is reasonable to believe that reviews that provide critical analysis, unique interpretations of existing literature, which connect different areas, shed novel light on available data, that are aware of their human partiality, will continue to be valuable in academic journals.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1648

Ithaka S+R: A Third Transformation? Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing

What is not yet clear is how disruptive this [AI] growth will be. To this end, we interviewed 12 leaders in stakeholder communities ranging from large publishers and technology disruptors to academic librarians and scholars. The consensus among the individuals with whom we spoke is that generative AI will enable efficiency gains across the publication process. Writing, reviewing, editing, and discovery will all become easier and faster. Both scholarly publishing and scientific discovery in turn will likely accelerate as a result of AI-enhanced research methods. From that shared premise, two distinct categories of change emerged from our interviews. In the first and most commonly described future, the efficiency gains made publishing function better but did not fundamentally alter its dynamics or purpose. In the second, much hazier scenario, generative AI created a transformative wave that could dwarf the impacts of either the first or second digital transformations [URL added].

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.321519

"Market Sizing Update 2024: Has OA Hit a Peak?"

The data suggest that OA’s share of output has likely peaked in 2023.

Our earlier sneak peek at the market suggested it peaked at 49% of output in 2022, falling to 48% in 2023. Our latest data here suggests OA just peaked at 50% share in 2022-2023 and may fall a few percentage points in the coming years.

Results from our survey and anecdotal feedback suggest more of the same for 2024: large OA-only publishers are likely to see continued declines, while established publishers will see continued growth.

The market will consolidate further. Long-term OA growth is likely to be less that it has been – perhaps mid-to-high single digits – but with increasing shares going to the larger publishers.

https://deltathink.com/news-views-market-sizing-update-2024-has-oa-hit-a-peak/

Forthcoming: Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons

Publishing Beyond the Market argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. . . . Through critical engagement with the open access landscape, the book reveals the shortcomings of market-centric and policy-based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism, and private control of publishing. . . .

It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access and subscription publishing. . . . By illustrating how these projects build towards a commons-based publishing future, and how they may complement other approaches to publishing within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies, and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision.

Samuel A. Moore [the author] is the Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Libraries and a College Research Associate at King’s College Cambridge.

https://tinyurl.com/3wp4z5s5