Oct
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AI and scholarly publishing: unfashionable glimpses of hope
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We were sitting having dinner under the awning of a restaurant in the Place d’Armes, the main square of Luxembourg. Charles Clark, copyright advisor to the Publishers Association was rehearsing the arguments which he and I, as delegates to the European Commission DGXIII Legal Observatory were to make the next day at a meeting in the Batiment Jean Monet. I had just asked what the role of software was going to be in protecting digital copyrights, the waiter had topped up the red wine in our glasses, and the author of Clark on Copyright fell silent for a moment. then the great man declaimed “Maybe in fact the only way that we can regulate a technology is through the use of that technology… The answer to the machine lies in the machine!”
I have always been immensely proud that I was sitting at the table where this edict was first pronounced, at least five years before Charles published a book under this title in 2005. I must confess that I thought it was just a conversational flourish until I heard him use it in the meeting next day, and then in many meetings in the days thereafter. It remains however a notion of real value and power, and it applies much more widely than simply to the notification and protection of copyright, although it remains important there. I had been telling Charles about the ability of my EUROLEX database search software to find keywords in complex text, and the way in which we marked up legal documents with metadata that enabled the software to see how they related to each other and which one had come first. His response is particularly telling at this time, as we are engulfed in a new wave of pessimism about the potentially disruptive effects of a “new” technology. How like the early days of the dotcom boom in the late 1990s are these early years of the understanding of the impact of AI. Unreasonable optimism, stock market hype, lack of political leadership and direction on regulation, media pessimism about the end of all things familiar and a general consensus that this means the end of humans society as we have previously known it on Earth!
Just as the hype is unreasonable, so the pessimism is equally overdone. Perhaps we all need to be more aware of the 50 years or so developmental work which lie behind the current state of what we call artificial intelligence. perhaps we all need to be more aware of the serious homes that could take place, and the developmental track that we need to observe before we get to them. And I think that Giles would say that before we conclude that our own jobs are about to be automated, wilt to look at the problems caused by the machine which can be ameliorated by the machine.
If you are working in scholarly communications, for example, and you do feel pessimistic about the future, then the experience that I had in the middle of last month in Manchester would’ have been a useful tonic. Receiving an award from the UK professional body of scholarly publishing,ALPSP, was a huge and deeply gratifying honour for me personally, but as I looked out over a Conference crowd of 300 people, I also had to reflect upon the dedication and ingenuity in the body of the hall. Later on, Adam Day was honoured for his work at Clear Skies( Papermill Alarm). ( https://clear-skies.co.uk ). As I listened, I thought about an interview which I recently conducted for the Outsell FutureScapes video blog series, when I spoke to Elliot Lumb and Tiago Barros about their work at Research-Signals.com. we know that we have real problems with research integrity: we also know that we have some really clever people developing intelligent solutions. While fresh problems will appear overtime, fresh solutions will as well.
Is anyone under any doubt that we will create fully automated peer review systems which operate more successful than human beings? I have been watching this space since the work of UNSILO in Aarhus almost a decade ago, and I cannot now conceive that we will fail in the search for systems that detect plagiarism, copyright theft or papermill inventions that work at a higher percentage of efficiency than human peer reviewers. While the systems will all require human supervision, audit and checking, they will counter the ability of AI to be misused until we come to a further level of technological development which requires a further wave of watchdog development.
If I am right in this, then surely AI will change the game in every other respect as well. The recent launch by Digital Science of their Papers Pro environment is surely another significant developmental pointer. We are moving pace towards end to end article creation systems. The key question may be a political one: which authority authorises and certifies peer review software on behalf of funders, institutions, and researchers?
In some scientific disciplines, and in some laboratories, the development of the article as a report will become a function of the intelligence in the laboratory network.. In other words, the “article “will be in production from the beginning of the research process and will exist as a series of elements which can be drawn together and updated at will. Then our now elderly attempts at article processing automation – the Scholar One generation – will be replaced by systems which do not just process but actually create most elements of the article. Human intervention in detailing findings and drawing conclusions will of course remain critical: other sections of scientific articles, like methodologies and literature reviews, are already semi or completely automated. Those in the scholarly communications businesses who think that AI is all about data reuse, or, sadly about windfall profits from data sales, have not yet thought through the complete range of potential applications of machine intelligence . Now, surely, is the time, at the dawn of the age of scholarly self publishing, for everyone to think very hard about the role of the journal,
Will the thinking take place which is required across the entire scholarly waterfront in order to find and fund the technologies and the business models which will effectively recast the future for knowledge transfer in our society? Again I find a degree of pessimism that really surprises me. Then I heard from the founders of Scholarly Angels ( https://scholarly-angels.com ) . Seeing experienced entrepreneurs like Andrew Preston, Ben Kaube and Paul Peeters scouting the market for fundable initiatives, and start-ups to incubate is a hugely hopeful sign. Private equity and venture capital will not do this early stage work on its own. And the existing institutions of scholarly communication, when they talk change, too often talk about change as if it is something that happens to everybody else around them, but not to themselves. this may have got them through the “age of digitalisation“: it will not get them through in the age of machine intelligence.