Governing the scholarly AI Commons – Open Future

Project Rachel: Can an AI Become a Scholarly Author?

This paper documents Project Rachel, an action research study that created and tracked a complete AI academic identity named Rachel So. Through careful publication of AI-generated research papers, we investigate how the scholarly ecosystem responds to AI authorship. Rachel So published 10+ papers between March and October 2025, was cited, and received a peer review invitation. We discuss the implications of AI authorship on publishers, researchers, and the scientific system at large. This work contributes empirical action research data to the necessary debate about the future of scholarly communication with super human, hyper capable AI systems.

Charting AI’s Role in Scientific Discovery — Renaissance Philanthropy – A brighter future for all through science, technology, and innovation

Renaissance Philanthropy, with support from Google.org , is conducting a landscape study of AI integration in scientific research — and we want your perspective.

Building Collective Intelligence Networks for Flourishing Scientific Communities

Scientific communities are straining under mounting challenges—knowledge fragmentation, outdated publication processes, institutional erosion and funding cuts—that threaten our capacity to address urgent global problems. Traditional scientific process

Debates On Frontier Artificial Intelligence Governance: The AI Triad

Analytical Paper Optional: All enrolled students have the option of completing a research paper of at least 20-25 pages, with faculty and peer review of a substantially complete draft. This paper can be used to satisfy the analytical paper requirement for J.D. students. Prerequisite: This course is intended for students intending to work in the […]

Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.

We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.

Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.

We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.

Scientific Paper Planner - AI Research Planning

Structure your scientific research with AI-powered guidance

Kempner Researchers Create Social Network for “AI Scientists” to Collaborate - Kempner Institute

Science rarely advances exclusively through lone researchers. Progress often comes from discussion and collaboration — scientists sharing ideas, questioning one another, and refining their thinking together. Now, a team of […]

A New Paradigm for Scientific Publishing, Peer Review, and Impact Assessment

Scientific publishing and peer review have evolved little in three centuries, while the demands placed on them have grown profoundly. The growing role of artificial intelligence has underscored deep, systemic shortcomings of an aging system that has largely evaded innovation, a system whose origins are appallingly closer to the invention of the printing press than to the internet. We can do better – much better. This article is intended as the beginning of a communal experiment: a living document that critically reviews the modern academic publishing and peer-review system and presents a concrete framework to address what bibliometrics experts¹ have characterized as "the pervasive misapplication of indicators to the evaluation of scientific performance". Building on the Leiden Manifesto, DORA, and a body of scholarship spanning many disciplines and decades, we present a community-governed, non-profit platform organized around three trust-weighted impact factors, for articles, authors, and reviewers, with full algorithmic transparency, an open development log, and structural decoupling of credibility scoring from content moderation and from monetization. We invite the community to discuss, critique, and help shape it.

Professionalising Community Management Roles in Interdisciplinary Research Projects

In this article we discuss community management in interdisciplinary research teams, focusing on recognising and professionalising roles referred to here as the Research Community Managers (RCM). Drawing insights and examples from research and data science projects, we discuss how RCM roles address some of the research’s most pressing challenges, from promoting best practices for open research and reproducibility to engaging diverse stakeholders in community-led research and ensuring fair recognition for their contributions. We offer a Community Maturation Indicator and share examples of projects from The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI), where institutionally supported RCM roles were established. With the aim to integrate RCM expertise in teams involved in data science and AI research, we provide an RCM Skills and Competencies Framework. We also propose a roadmap for professionalising RCM roles by improving recognition and rewards, potential career paths and organisational support structures. To systematically sustain and progress these roles, we recommend institutional investment in establishing RCM teams that are empowered to prioritise collaboration, transparency and community-based approaches in interdisciplinary projects, such as in data science and AI. As a team, RCMs are well placed to connect disparate teams, initiatives and resources across the organisation, building more resilient research communities that can achieve greater innovation, improved project outcomes and a strongly connected ecosystem, with impacts extending beyond their narrow contexts.

Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons

<I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. By deploying theoretical literature on science and technology studies, care ethics, and the commons, the book critically interrogates open access and reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing. A case study of Plan S—the multifunder European policy for open access publishing—explores its tendency to rehearse all the failures of commercialisation. Through critical engagement with the open access landscape, the book reveals the shortcomings of market-centric and policy-based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism, and private control of publishing.<BR /><BR /> Going forward, <I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> explores the importance of collectivity and democratic governance within the transition to open access publishing. It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access and subscription publishing. In weaving themselves together in order to "scale small" these publishing initiatives would act as a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care. By illustrating how these projects build toward a commons-based publishing future, and how they may complement other approaches to publishing within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies, and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision.

Creative commons licenses and copyright may not stop academic work being used to train AI - Impact of Social Sciences

Considering the legal standing of creative commons licenses & copyright, Martin Eve suggests legal protections for academic work are unlikely to be forthcoming.

The Due Process Deficit: Auditing AI Governance in U.S. Higher Education

As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.

Why the Stockholm Declaration will never work

Abstract The Stockholm Declaration calls for a moral reformation of scientific publishing—replacing commercial publishers with scholar-led journals, rewarding quality over quantity and instituting independent oversight. While noble in spirit, it fundamentally misdiagnoses the disease. The crisis of science stems not from paper mills or profit motives but from systemic incentives that reward volume, novelty and prestige over validity and reliability. Non-profit ownership will not neutralize the prestige economy, sleuth-led policing cannot scale, and ‘integrity registries’ would merely replace metrics with surveillance. True reform requires rebuilding the publishing infrastructure as a public utility: publicly funded, free to publish and read, and stripped of hierarchy and financial incentives.