FREE UKSG webinar: The Open Access – AI Conundrum: Does Free to Read Mean Free to Train?

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, 2025
From 12:00 GMT to 13:00 GMT

..

Where

Online
United Kingdom

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. This talk highlights the need for urgent policy discussions to address how AI training on open-access content may undermine the research system’s foundational principles of transparency, attribution, and knowledge traceability, while, at the same time, imposing the increasingly unmanageable cost of open-access transformational agreements on underfunded higher education providers.

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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.


• Consider systemic impacts of AI intermediation in knowledge production
• Critically assess the impact of OA mandates in the age of AI
• Reflect on the impact of disruptive technological innovations


General knowledge of publishing and information governance systems required.


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UKSG Webinars Notes for Participants 2025

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This is a free webinar and is open to members and non-members of UKSG alike – Please note that advance registration is required.

REGISTER HERE

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.


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

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