Ithaka’s Roger C. Schonfeld, announcing a an AI licensing-deal tracker on The Scholarly Kitchen:
In recent months, several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs (Large Language Models). These deals illuminate how major publishers are grappling with their strategy amid uncertainty, but thus far they have been unavailable to smaller and medium size publishers. To understand the dynamics around this fast-developing market, my colleagues Maya Dayan and Dylan Ruediger and I are launching a tracker of these licensing deals.
It’s a useful service, the tracking, but the piece introducing it—in line with Schonfeld’s general approach—is to write like a publishing-industry analyst (who’s up, who’s down?), rather than as a representative of the university knowledge-sharing community that Ithaka S+R serves. It’s bizarre.