Analysis and news
Artificial intelligence; real impact Michael Upshall reports on the results of a survey on the use of AI in academic publishing
Unsilo has released the results of a survey on artificial intelligence (AI) usage in academic publishing, asking questions such as: how is it used and what factors impede its adoption. More than 3,000 new academic journal
articles are published every day, and yet many of the tools for processing content through the academic workflow are frequently very manually based. The Unsilo survey, featuring the views of publishers and other stakeholders in the scholarly workflow, was carried out between June and September. The results were presented at a panel session at the Frankfurt Book Fair, chaired by Toby Green, former head of publishing at OECD.
Take-up of AI
The findings of the survey show a steady take-up of AI tools by publishers. Two- thirds of respondents are currently using at least one AI tool, and only 3 per cent of respondents felt that AI could not benefit their activities in some way. Some 45 per cent of respondents not currently using AI plan to introduce some AI tools in the coming 12 months. As for the perennial ‘build or buy’ question, around a third of publishers use only their own in-house resources. The remainder use external suppliers, or a mixture of the two. How the publishers plan to expand their AI capability is interesting. The largest response was to expand the publisher’s internal AI team, which suggests an emphasis on keeping skills internal to the organisation, rather than buying in external tools. For publishers currently using AI tools, the biggest justification for AI tools was saving time (65 per cent), suggesting that the current implementation of AI tools is based very much around tools to improve specific pain points in the academic workflow. By far the biggest application is to provide text analytics tools (more than 40 per cent of all implementations). The most widely used AI tools are machine learning and NLP (natural- language processing), with rule-based
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“As for the
perennial ‘build or buy’ question, around a third of publishers use only their own in-house resources”
tools close behind. Linked data is used by less than 10 per cent of respondents, and open linked data by even fewer. The largest single use of AI tools is to add and to curate metadata. Remarkably, more than 40 per cent of metadata is added by in-house staff, which suggests there is ample scope for automation.
Trust, bias and accuracy For all the coverage in the media about questions of bias and privacy being topics of major concern, few of the respondents seemed to be taking action about these issues. Fewer than 10 per
cent of publishers check their AI tools for bias, and only 8 per cent for privacy and compliance with GDPR. There is a paradox here; the two biggest
reasons cited for not using AI tools more were ‘not enough time’ and ‘uncertain quality of results’. But fewer than 20 per cent of respondents stated they were checking the AI tools they use for reliability and consistency. Unsilo CEO Thomas Laursen said: ‘This
survey confirms our experience with several academic publishers, who are both keen to get involved with AI and yet, at the same time, reluctant to relinquish human control over the academic workflow. We hope this survey will encourage more publishers to take the plunge with this transformational technology. It will be interesting to compare these results with the situation in a year’s time, as more publishers learn from their experience and provide feedback.’
Michael Upshall is head of sales and business development at Unsilo
December 2019/January 2020 Research Information
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