United Kingdom

Although scholarly communications has become more open, problems with predatory and problematic publishers remain. There are commercial providers of lists, start-up/renegade Internet lists of good/bad and the researchers, publishers and assessors that try to understand and process what being on/off a list means to themselves, their careers and their institutions. Still, these problems persist and leaves many asking: where is the list? This plenary panel will discuss the problems of “predatory” publishing and what, if anything, publishers, our community and researchers can do to try and help minimise their abundancy/impact.

Chaired by Lorraine Estelle

UKSG Annual Conference 2024

There is No List: (How) Can We Combat “Predatory” Publishers in a Changing Scholarly Communications Landscape?

keynote

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

ChatGPT is convenient. This is one of the key reasons for its popularity. It does however present problems for academic integrity, with no reference to the source of information and no accreditation for authors. In this session I’m going to discuss a project combining the convenience of conversational discovery with the reliability of academic sources. Based on the ProQuest One Literature database, the assistant is using large language models to generate answers from academic literature including references to the source of information. I will discuss the goals, the details of the project and technology used, the outcomes and the lessons learned.

Between Convenience and Academic Integrity: Using Generative AI for Discovering Content

In this session, we present CORE-GPT, a novel question- answering platform that combines GPT-based language models and more than 32 million full-text open access scientific articles from CORE. We first demonstrate that GPT3.5 and GPT4 cannot be relied upon to provide references or citations for generated text. We then introduce CORE-GPT which delivers evidence-based answers to questions, along with citations and links to the cited papers, greatly increasing the trustworthiness of the answers and reducing the risk of hallucinations.

CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering

Q&A - David Pride / Christine Stohn

Octopus.ac is a UKRI funded research publishing model, designed to promote best practice. Intended to sit alongside journals, Octopus provides a space for researcher collaboration, recording work in detail, and receiving feedback from others, allowing journals to focus on narrative. The platform removes existing barriers to publishing. It’s an entirely free, open space for researchers, without editorial and pre-publication peer review processes. The only requirement for authors is a valid ORCiD ID. Without barriers, Octopus must provide feedback mechanisms to ensure the community can self-moderate. During this session, we’ll explore Octopus’ aims to foster a collaborative environment and incentivise quality.

Creating credibility through community: Encouraging high quality publications in an environment with no barriers to publishing

Over the last few years we have witnessed a seismic shift in the scholarly ecosystem. Three years since outset of the COVID pandemic and the establishment UN Publishers Compact, this is discussion-led presentation will look at how four UK Universities Presses have adopted a consultative and collaborative approach on projects to support their institutional missions, engage with the wider scholarly community while building on a commitment to make a meaningful difference to society.

Vision, mission, passion: how UK University Presses collaborate to publish impactful research and promote learning, culture and social change

The introduction of Transformative Agreements created the need for Open Access and Subs & Access teams to work closely together to evaluate and manage implementation of these deals. However, R&P deals were never supposed to be permanent. Block grant support of R&P deals ends in 2025 shifting the full burden of the costs to subscription budgets. This panel discussion will aim to bring together subscription and open access librarians to discuss their priorities (access to resources vs publishing Open Access), where they overlap (supporting the use of Open Access material), potential plans for walking away from deals and what scholarly publishing may look like in the future.

Looking at the cliff's edge: the end of block grant funding for R&P deals

This breakout session will bring together several micro-presses from different backgrounds to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the smallest operators to survive and thrive in a quickly changing scholarly communications landscape. A commitment to bibliodiversity implies that the transition to a fully Open Access future should happen in a way that allows scholarly publishing to be done by presses at a range of scales, including the very small – yet some of the prevailing OA business models are difficult or impossible for micro-presses to engage with. How can tiny presses realise some of the benefits of scale in the marketplace? Is there demand or potential for new collective funding models or infrastructure to support micro-press OA journal publishing? Why are there lots of small society and scholar-led presses, and lots of larger professional publishers, but rather few independent micro-presses? We’ll bring together a society publisher, an independent micro-press and a small university press to explore these issues, with an eye to a truly bibliodiverse future.


Small Fish in a Big Pond: Micro-press Perspectives

Due to the evolving nature of Open Access many librarians find themselves managing an OA service on top of their main roles. Ruth O’Hara is a Collection Management & Resource Description Librarian and Grace O’Brien is an Electronic Resources Librarian at Maynooth University. Together they work on transformative agreements and deal with various queries on OA. In this talk they will offer tips on how to navigate challenges and share what they have learnt over the last few years. They will provide an overview on how to manage a successful Open Access service, while balancing the demands of their varied workloads.

How to manage a successful Open Access service in addition to the demands of a primary role

Library patrons want to search for and locate authors by particular identity markers, such as gender identification, country of origin, sexual orientation, nature of disability, and the many intersectional points that allow an author to express a point-of-view. Artificial Intelligence, skilled web researchers, and data scientists in general struggle to achieve accuracy on single identity markers, such as gender. And what right does anybody have to affix identity metadata to an author other than the author theirselves? And what of the risks in disseminating author identity metadata in electronic distribution platforms and in library catalog systems? Can a "fully informed" author even imagine all the possible misuses of their identity metadata?

Author Identity Metadata: Why a Small Publisher Can Address a Major Challenge

Research integrity leads in research-intensive universities engage closely with all aspects related to this topic, including, but not limited to, receiving and coordinating responses to issues raised related to potential breaches of integrity, developing and implementing relevant procedures and policies, developing and delivering training, and ensuring a positive research culture. I will take the audience through the processes initiated when concerns are raised to illustrate the sometimes unforeseen challenges that can arise and discuss potential improvements.

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Between Convenience and Academic Integrity: Using Generative AI for Discovering Content

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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