Copyright, GenAI, and the future of academic publishing - Leiden Madtrics
peter.suber's bookmarks 2025-12-05
Summary:
"Generative artificial intelligence poses significant challenges to copyright law and the principles of open science. In a new preprint, I study this complex interplay and existing regulatory frameworks. This blog post provides an overview of my central findings.
I am pleased to share a new preprint that has just been posted on arXiv: “Who Owns the Knowledge? Copyright, GenAI, and the Future of Academic Publishing.” The text grew from my contribution to the 20th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics and is now substantially expanded, both in terms of legal analysis and policy implications.
My paper asks a deceptively simple question: who is best in place to regulate the use of research output for training generative AI systems? I argue that current copyright frameworks in major AI-developing jurisdictions – the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, China – are not equipped to answer this question in a way that is satisfactory for the academic community. Instead, they tend to privilege either innovation narratives or risk management, while the issue of using scholarly works as training data remains in a legal grey zone. Key international initiatives such as OECD AI Principles, UNESCO AI Ethics Recommendation, and G7 Hiroshima Process International Guiding Principles for Advanced AI System do not provide satisfactory answers either."