This is a fantastic opportunity to listen to expert speakers with no travelling required. This is a free webinar – Please note that advance registration is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording after the session.
When
Thursday, February 5, 2026
From 12:00 GMT to 13:00 GMT
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Where
Online
United Kingdom
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About the Event
The Open Access movement, originally designed to democratise human access to research, now faces unintended consequences as AI systems extensively use freely available academic content for training large language models. While Creative Commons licenses permit such use, researchers primarily chose open access to maximise human readership, not to provide free training data for commercial AI companies. This creates significant risks for academic ecosystems, including “citation laundering” where AI outputs obscure original sources, disrupting knowledge attribution and academic career incentives. At the same time, excluding AI systems from OA research carries its own risks: as high-quality scholarship retreats once again behind paywalls, AI outputs may become even more inaccurate, more vulnerable to data poisoning, and further prioritise misinformation over evidence.
This talk highlights the need for urgent policy discussions to navigate this dilemma – how to protect the research system’s foundational principles of transparency, attribution, and knowledge traceability, while also resisting the extraction of scholarly labour, the increasingly unmanageable cost of OA transformational agreements on libraries, and the enclosure of reliable knowledge in an AI-mediated world.
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Speakers
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Stephanie Decker
Professor of Strategy, Vice Dean of British Academy of Management Fellows College | University of Birmingham
Stephanie Decker is Professor of Strategy at Birmingham Business School and holds prestigious fellowships of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the British Academy of Management (BAM). She is known for her work at the intersection of history and management studies and has published widely on African business history. She currently serves as the Co-Vice Chair for Research & Publications at the British Academy of Management (BAM), and previously as a co-editor and joint editor-in-chief at Business History. At BAM, she leads on Open Access policy and is one of the editors of the forthcoming White Paper series on AI.
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Caroline Ball
Community Engagement Lead | Open Book Collective
Caroline Ball is the Community Engagement Lead for the Open Book Collective, a charity working to bring together open access book publishers, publishing service providers, and libraries to work toward a sustainable future for open access books. Her previous roles include academic librarian, copyright and licensing advisor, and lecturer in publishing, as well as voluntary work as co-founder of the #ebookSOS campaign. She is also an active Wikipedian, was awarded the UK Wikimedian of the Year award in 2020, and currently serves on the Wikimedia UK board of trustees. Her research interests centre on knowledge equity, information ethics, and systemic barriers and biases in dominant knowledge systems.
Rob Johnson
Managing Director | Research Consulting
Rob Johnson is the Managing Director of Research Consulting, a mission-driven business which works to improve the effectiveness and impact of research and scholarly communication. He began his career with KPMG, the international professional services firm, before working in senior research management roles at the University of Nottingham. Since founding Research Consulting in 2013 he has led more than 150 projects in the field of scholarly communication and research. He is Vice Chair of UKSG, a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and holds an MSc in Higher Education Management from Loughborough University.
Learning outcomes
• Understand how algorithmic bias can affect academic knowledge systems
• Recognise copyright and attribution challenges in AI
• Appreciate the labour impacts of AI technologies
• Identify risks to academic integrity and knowledge creation
• Develop strategies to manage ethical risks in scholarly communication
Subject level and previous knowledge required
Introductory and non-intensive, no previous knowledge or experience required.
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Registrations
This is a free webinar and is open to members and non-members of UKSG alike – Please note that advance registration is required.
Unable to attend? Register anyway and we will send you a link to a recording of the webinar after the event. If you have already registered and are subsequently unable to attend, please do not cancel your registration – only active registrations will receive the recording in a follow-up e-mail.
Accessibility
UKSG wants to provide the best possible experience for all our delegates, making presentations as accessible and inclusive as possible. Our intention were possible is to strongly encourage our speakers to provide auto generated closed captioning for both live and recorded events as well as to make sure their slides are as easy as possible for all people to read. In addition we can provide auto generated transcripts post event for each of the recorded sessions.
If you have particular accessibility needs or questions about this webinar, we welcome you to contact Samira Sotomayor.
Feedback
The UKSG webinars are great for me – they offer a wide range of topics and are very well prepared. I never experienced any technical difficulties. Due to the austerity measures brought by the recent worldwide events the training budget in my institution was frozen, so the fact that UKSG webinars are free is really a boon too!
Anonymous
The UKSG webinar was fantastic – well-organized, timely, accessible, and with an array of presenters that had insight into the topic
Anonymous
Great to squeeze in so much useful knowledge and information without having to go out to a conference. I could enjoy taking it in with a sandwich at my desk! I felt very empowered afterwards.
Emma Thompson, Glasgow Caledonian University
NB: UKSG reserves the right to alter or vary the programme due to events or circumstances beyond its reasonable control without being obliged to refund monies.
Contact
This is a free webinar – Please note that advance registration is required.
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Cancellations
If you have already registered and are subsequently unable to attend, please do not cancel your registration – only active registrations will receive the recording in a follow-up e-mail.