Science, on Elsevier’s new summary-and-citation tool LeapSpace:
LeapSpace is offering what appears to be one of the largest corpuses of full-text, paywalled papers and books, totaling 18 million. The AI can access articles from Elsevier’s own collection and those of its four partners: Emerald, the Institute of Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine Group, and Sage Publications. (It pays its partners a royalty per use, and the tool gives their articles more exposure.) Elsevier has promised that the analytical reports will not favor citations to its own content, and that users’ queries will be kept private and not used to train the proprietary LLMs, from the OpenAI group, that support LeapSpace.
The whole framing of the piece is around whether it will gain traction with scholars. Fine, but the bigger questions are about the knowledge effects of proprietary summary-and-citation tools like this—and the way that Elsevier keeps skimming new surveillance-publishing cream off its original profiteering off scholars’ donated labor.
LeapSpace? The camel-cased vacuity of the product name is an index for the whole thing: extractive parasitism on the knowledge that human scholars craft.
A side note: The only big commercial publisher playing in the Elsevier garden is Sage, which has been slower (to its credit?) to add prediction products and AI on top of its huge social science journal stack. Elsevier’s real competitors in this AI summary-and-citation space are Digital Science/Springer Nature (with shared parent Holtzbrinck) and quasi-publisher Clarivate. They, like Elsevier, have the proprietary bibliographic databases to power products (even if limited to abstracts and metadata) like LeapSpace.