Copywrong

Copywrong

In a blow to copyright supporters, it appears the US federal government will not be putting much weight behind protecting copyright holders, at least according to The Washington Post’s analysis of the Trump administration’s moves against the Library of Congress and, in particular, the firing of Shira Perlmutter, the US Register of Copyrights and Director of the Copyright Office.

The Post and Congressman Joseph Morelle suggest that Perlmutter’s firing was in retaliation for the release of a report suggesting that copyright must be observed by technology companies. Congress, surprisingly, appears to be pushing back against the White House over control of the Library, and Perlmutter is challenging the Trump administration in court. Nonetheless, the apparent weakening of support in the administration around copyright protections is not an encouraging sign for publishers.

In other concerning copyright news, 18 copyright experts withdrew their names as Advisers from the Restatement of Law, Copyright, which was approved last week by the American Law Institute (ALI). ALI produces and publishes Restatements of Law that:

…synthesize matters of common law for the purpose of providing guidance to the courts. Thus, when various state courts rule, for instance, on tort or contract matters, the ALI will use that body of case law to write a Restatement that seeks to harmonize common and sound decisions – and these Restatements may then be referenced by future courts almost as if they were statutory law.

The Restatement of Law, Copyright was controversial from the onset as copyright is statutory law. In a letter to ALI, 14 of the withdrawing experts write:

From the beginning of the project, the treatment of copyright law by the Reporters has been one that unequivocally limits the scope of copyright protection, and the language and tone that has been used throughout the project reveals underlying bias and an unfavorable view of copyright.

One area that the 14 scholars highlight, which is particularly noteworthy in light of the firing of Perlmutter purportedly over her stance on fair use, is the “misrepresentation of the scope of the fair use doctrine”:

Section 6.12 on fair use, one of the most important copyright law doctrines, elevates uncommon, minor, and ancillary points that serve to create the misperception that the fair use doctrine is far more broadly applicable than is supported by the case law and the policies animating it. The Reporters afford more weight to decisions that found in favor of fair use, thus limiting the scope of copyright protection, while describing those that found against fair use as having a narrow or very limited application. Specifically, the Reporters rely heavily on the Second Circuit’s Authors Guild v. Google decision, effectively elevating its significance on par with (and possibly exceeding) relevant Supreme Court decisions. The court made clear in Authors Guild that it was a case that “tests the boundaries of fair use,” and therefore its applicability to other cases is strained. Instead, the lengthy discussions and extreme reliance on Authors Guild in this section makes it appear that the case is typical, and not an edge case. Significantly, the Restatement also fails to acknowledge that parts of the decision, and many other fair use cases decided around the same time, are likely in conflict with the Supreme Court’s Warhol v. Goldsmith decision, and thus no longer good law.

Four additional copyright scholars similarly withdrew their names via a separate letter in which they emphasize that many of the Advisers – and the US Copyright office – object to characterizations in the Restatement:

The current draft of the Restatement does not reflect a consensus or even broad agreement of the Adviser group, nor does it adequately address the innumerable objections made by the group as well as, and especially, by the Copyright Office. Yet, the draft and the Reporter’s video to the membership misleadingly suggest that its positions were derived and faithfully synthesized from the inputs of its participants as well as of the Copyright Office, when in fact the drafts have taken positions directly contrary to those of the Copyright Office (and in the face of repeated Copyright Office objections, as documented in the Office’s many Comments throughout the process) and of many of the Advisers.

Taken together, the firing of the head of the Copyright Office and the approval of the ALI Restatement do not augur well for content producers. These moves come, perhaps not coincidentally, as the contest with AI companies over fair use heats up.

Industry AI Roundup

This month saw a raft of industry AI announcements. Wiley announced an AI search partnership with Perplexity. The collaboration is aimed at educational institutions and appears to require a subscription both to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro and to Wiley’s publications (the service is described as allowing members of “institutions that subscribe to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro to access purchased Wiley educational collections and resources in areas such as nursing, business, and engineering”).

This arrangement is different from licensing content to an AI company to train a large language model (LLM) and more in line with the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model we discussed in The Brief last May. It is less a licensing deal than a route for Wiley to perpetuate and expand their subscription sales to libraries, which will then make the materials available to the AI service in use at the institution. It is also worth noting that this deal, like most AI partnerships seen to date, appears to focus on educational materials such as textbooks and reference works rather than journal content.

Wiley also announced a new AI search tool for its content built on the open source toolkit from Amazon Web Services. This joins other AI-search announcements this month including Oxford University Press (OUP)’s Oxford Law Pro (designed to search across OUP’s legal books, journals, and short-form content). But tools that support searching across a single publisher’s corpus (including a new offering from 67 Bricks that will allow publishers to build similar tools and Silverchair’s Dynamic Discovery tool for publishers on its platform) fulfill a limited use case for researchers. There are instances where one might wish to interrogate a narrow corpus of information, but in most cases, a researcher wants to search across (or get summary answers from) the entirety of the research literature.

In other industry AI news, Wolters Kluwer has announced the development of Ovid Guidelines AI, which is described as a workflow tool for committees to create and manage guidelines. From the press release:

By embedding industry gold standards such as Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) directly into the workflow, the platform supports guideline authors in documenting, justifying, and updating recommendations with full methodological transparency. This workflow brings automation to the more labor-intensive, error-prone research tasks in managing guidelines. The solution supports end-to-end guideline lifecycle management by uniting researchers, expert panels, and review boards through a shared, auditable environment for coordinating projects and capturing key evidence, deliberations, and decisions over time.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has signed up to be the first test case for this new workflow product. The development of a robust authoring product for guidelines is long overdue, so kudos to Wolters Kluwer for bringing this to market. That said, the “AI” aspect of this product (using “Google’s advanced Gemini models and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to accelerate natural language understanding, data ingestion, and clinical content processing”) strikes us a bit of bandwagon riding; we look forward to being convinced otherwise.

Briefly Noted

Bina Venkataraman, writing in The Washington Post, declares the death of American innovation, suggesting that the ongoing moves to dismantle the US scientific enterprise are being spearheaded by leadership at companies that already dominate their markets in hopes of staving off future disruptions.
 
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has seen $40 million in terminated contracts from the US federal government and appears headed for a major reorganization. Fifty of its 1,000 employees have already been laid off, and National Academies president Marcia McNutt expects that another 250 may lose their jobs as well.
 
Authors have withdrawn a paper after two rounds of peer review from the journal Public Health Reports. The journal, which is owned and administered by the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service (and published with Sage), requested that the authors delete words such as “gender,” “cisgender,” and “equitable” from their article, as well as removing demographic data of the study’s sample, to comply with the administration’s anti-DEI Executive Order 14151.
 
Several research societies and their publishing programs have stepped up efforts to support research funding, preserve research integrity, and maintain the scientific record. This includes the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society pledging to provide research reports to replace the canceled US National Climate Assessment; the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Cell Biology, the American Society for Microbiology, and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology filing an amicus brief asking the court to block the termination of NIH grants; the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association filing a lawsuit seeking to reverse the destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the editors of six leading infectious disease journals publishing an editorial reaffirming their “commitment to maintaining an open platform for scientific exchange, free from political interference.”
 
The NIH continues to promote that “there is a free pathway to comply” with its Biden-administration Nelson Memo policy requiring all research output to be made freely available immediately upon publication. While this is technically true, hybrid journals that will accept papers without charge and allow zero-embargo deposit of author-accepted manuscripts may prove to be a minority. The policies of most major science publishers (such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature) require that archiving a Green OA version of accepted manuscripts is subject to either an embargo period or the payment of an open access fee.
 
Ed Martin, the controversial Interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia who sent “vaguely threatening” letters to multiple research journals, has been removed from his position and replaced by Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro. It remains unclear whether the threats to research journals were part of a larger policy approach by the administration or solely the work of Martin. Mother Jones suggests the letters came at the behest of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 
 
Which holds more sway over Chinese authors, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Journal Ranking Table? Perhaps we’ll find out this year as eLife loses its JIF in June but remains on the CAS list as a “top tier journal.” In other CAS news, an article in Nature this month adds to accusations that the Journal Ranking Table is deliberately skewed to favor domestic Chinese journals over those published internationally.
 
Meanwhile, Clarivate is making what, at first glance, seems like a significant, positive change to the JIF, excluding “citations to and from retracted content when calculating the JIF numerator, ensuring that citations from retracted articles do not contribute to the numerical value of the JIF.” Although a welcome development, the short time window for which citations count (two years) and the (sadly) long timespan for a typical article retraction lead us to ask whether this will make much difference?
 
NEJM AI has introduced the Development, Evaluation, and Assessment of Large Language Models (DEAL) checklist, “designed to guide authors and reviewers in reporting LLM studies.”
 
Nature has released the results of a survey of 5,000 academics, showing a divided community as far as the use of AI in research communication.
 
Emerald has acquired now publishers, an international academic press of peer-reviewed publications in Business, Economics, Computer Science, and Engineering.
 
Matthew Salter has been appointed Senior Director of Publications for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). C&E had the privilege of supporting MAA in this recruitment.
 
Congratulations are due to Kelley Squazzo for being appointed Director of Project MUSE.
 
Richard Sever has been named a TIME100 Health Leader for “spreading science.”
 
Einar Fredriksson, founder of IOS Press, has passed away. 
 
HighWire Press and Springer Nature both celebrated anniversaries this month: HighWire its 30^th birthday and Springer Nature 10 years of its constituent companies’ merger.
 
In disappointing news for aspiring wordsmiths, it turns out that “Prompt Engineer” was never actually a real job.

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A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and an APA Pope – Hector Diaz (@iamhectordiaz) on Bluesky