AI deals underscore importance of open access (opinion)

"Other than refraining from publishing or posting anything on the internet, there is no choice an academic author can make that will definitively hold back their content from AI training. To an author looking for a way to retreat from the brave new world of AI to a place where they can watch from the sidelines until the dust has settled, paywalled publishing may feel like the safest bet.

However, taking a step back to consider the broader implications reveals that paywalled publishing is not aligned with academic self-interest. AI is not just a shiny new product that has captured the public’s imagination; it is fundamentally also a computational research methodology with profound implications for what questions we can imagine asking and how those questions can be answered...."