What Is Open Access?

Sound clip: You’re listening to a Times Higher Education podcast.

Sound clip: Open access to me is a really simple yet powerful concept. You know, it really is the ability for anyone anywhere to be able to access and contribute to the record of science. And it’s got to be coupled with the ability or the rights for people to use that digital information as fully as possible. So for me, open access is that access, contribution, and reuse, unfettered reuse of scientific and scholarly information.

Sound clip: Some journals require people to have a pre-registration and people will go and just create a pre-registration after they’ve already collected the data, etc. And so in which case, we’re not being honest and we’re just paying lip service to an open research practice, but not using it in the best possible way. So I think that it would be really nice if people listening to this think about how they could use something like pre-registrations to keep themselves honest and engage with that with the next project that they kick off.

Eliza Compton: Hello and welcome to the Times Higher Education podcast. I’m Eliza Compton, interim editor of Campus, Times Higher Education’s best practice and advice platform. Today I’m talking to two experts about open access, the global movement that aims to make research outputs available online immediately and without charge or restrictions. UNESCO defines open access as free access to information and unrestricted use of electronic resources for everyone and applies this definition to texts and data, software, audio, video and multimedia. The idea is that knowledge and especially taxpayer funded research should be available beyond the confines of subscription-based journals for anyone to use, build upon and benefit from. The open access movement has been around since the early 90s, coinciding with and driven by the rise of the internet. But it really gained traction with the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001 and it feels timely to be talking about it now. The US has committed to making all federally funded research open access by the end of 2025, a process that involved my first guest, open access advocate Heather Joseph, who is a consultant to the White House Office of Science and Technology’s 2022 Nelson Memorandum. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework consultation for open access has just opened. And my second guest, Steven Vidovic from the University of Southampton, talks about what changes for the REF 2029 might mean for research culture.

Eliza Compton: On Campus, we have just published a spotlight collection of advice and explainers on open access and open research from institutions as far afield as the UK, the US, Zimbabwe, Luxembourg and Kazakhstan. I encourage you to check it out as well as all our other articles, videos, webinars and podcast episodes at timeshighereducation.com/campus.

Eliza Compton: But now on with the show. My first guest has been an advocate for knowledge sharing and the open access movement since its earliest days. Heather Joseph had just joined the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition when the Budapest Declaration on Open Access was issued in 2002. She’s been executive director of SPARC since 2005 and is known for her policy work, leadership and international consultancy for organisations such as UNESCO, the World Health Organization and the World Bank. In 2021, she won the Miles Conrad Award, the National Information Standards Organization’s recognition for lifetime achievement in the information community. And her lecture as the recipient is a detailed history of the movement, its goals and strategies. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Eliza Compton: Hi, Heather. Welcome to the THE podcast.

Heather Joseph: Thanks for having me.

Eliza Compton: We’re really excited today to be speaking to you about open access because you’ve been involved with the movement for quite some time since 2001, I believe. Could you tell us a little bit about that, about your journey, and about the work that you now do with SPARC?

Heather Joseph: Yeah, sure. I actually came to the open access movement through having spent 15 years as a journal publisher. So I started out in the scholarly society, scientific society publishing world. My first job was with the American Astronomical Society at a really, I would say, fortunate time in the very early 1990s, in 1990, actually, when the internet was just becoming just becoming. And my first professional challenge was trying to help that organization figure out how to move journal publishing from a print analog process to an online process. So I think it kind of shaped the way I thought about scientific communication, helping scientists share science the way they want it, to be able to get it where they want it, when they want it, how they want it, which sort of naturally led me into continuing work on that trajectory. And in 2001, SPARC actually recruited me as a publisher to help sort of further that evolution. And I just happened to be at an organization that was interested in, I would say, continuing that trajectory. And we were invited to participate in the meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. So really was fortunate, kind of right place, right time, and being raised in the scientific community by folks whose natural bent was: it’s about communicating the science. It’s about sharing the science, getting it out there. So right place, right time.

Eliza Compton: Just to clarify, SPARC stands for Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Is that right?

Heather Joseph: Yeah, that’s right.

Eliza Compton: And could you tell us a little bit about SPARC, about what they do?

Heather Joseph: Sure. We’re actually a library membership organization at our base. So I went from working for journal publishers, working as a journal publisher, to working for journal publishers’ largest single customer, if you will. And that to me, it’s also really interesting, sort of all roads lead to the work at the American Astronomical Society, because I think as a scientific society, the AAS had a, at the time, kind of a unique way of operating in that our publications committee was made up not only of the journal folks, you know, and the community, the researcher community, but we all always had academic and research librarians on our board. So when I went to SPARC, I remember actually thinking, well, this is just a natural continuum, right? It’s just moving, it’s the same community. And I hadn’t really realized the sort of separation that existed to a large degree between the library community and the publishing community, I think, until, you know, really deeper into my tenure at SPARC. But working for the library community at SPARC, I think has the mission of SPARC is really, again, to try to open up the ability of everyone everywhere who wants to access and contribute to communicating science and scholarship to be able to do that. So I always saw them as parallel communities rather than separate communities. And my job at SPARC, I think, is really to try to make that a reality.

Eliza Compton: Yeah, it’s a really interesting fit. I’ve realized that with our audience, I’m probably speaking to an informed audience who already knows a lot about the open access movement. But could you just give us a bit of a potted, I guess, explanation about what we mean when we say open access?

Heather Joseph: Yeah, open access to me is a really simple yet powerful concept. You know, it really is the ability for anyone anywhere to be able to access and contribute to the record of science. And it’s got to be coupled with the ability or the rights for people to use that digital information as fully as possible. So for me, open access is that access, contribution, and reuse, unfettered reuse of scientific and scholarly information.

Eliza Compton: And I think I read an interview with that you did with Frontiers a couple of years ago, where you were talking about the effect that COVID had had on where open research and open access are at the moment. I think your quote was that it broke the glass and freed up the processes, but that you weren’t sure that the movement that had occurred around COVID was going to stick. How are you feeling now?

Heather Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I feel pretty good that that was really one of those moments where the proof of concept just, you know, bursts open. And the idea that science is essentially kept behind paywalls or behind glass, if you will, unless or until there’s an emergency that forces you to break it and share it widely, that was always felt it’s the wrong way to be doing, to be thinking about communicating science, that science only gains in value. The public only reaps the benefits of science when it can be shared widely and built on, right? So we don’t get discoveries, cures, you know, insights into scientific research unless you tell someone what you’re working on and they have the ability to take your work and build on it. So, the COVID moment for me was early on in the pandemic, very early on in March of the pandemic, seeing one of the very first actions that health and science ministers from a dozen countries took was to say publicly: look, we’re calling on journal publishers, you know, scientists, make all articles related to novel coronavirus openly, immediately available in a digital format that we can fully and freely reuse, right? We need to do text and data mining, we need to run computational analysis on this. We need the articles and we need the underlying data. The first call was to open up this basic corpus of research to try to make progress. And I think we saw what happens, right? From the ability, particularly from the data front, but also from having the articles available that interpreted what the data meant openly and freely available. And I’d say that the biggest marker of why I feel like that moment had resonance that continues is that in the United States, you know, we now have the Nelson Memorandum requiring free and open access to all federally funded U.S. scientific research, which is about $90 billion worth of scientific research a year. And in the rationale, you know, and the supporting materials, the rationale for that policy, Dr. Nelson, who wrote the policy and the OSTP team behind it, specifically cited the experience with COVID, saying, you know, we saw what happened when we opened up that particular subset of materials. We need to do that with everything. So I really do think it gave quite a bit of proof of concept and impetus for openness to continue.

Eliza Compton: Yeah, that argument that federally funded research should be accessible to everyone, and not just researchers, but to policymakers and professionals, practitioners, so medical practitioners, for example, is a very compelling argument for it. Are there any downsides to open access or open research from your point of view?

Heather Joseph: Yeah, I mean, there’s always downsides, right? I think the toughest challenge for open access is getting the models, the business models to support it correct. And I think people often ask me if I could go back and change one thing about the open access movement. You know, if we could go back from the beginning and change it, I’d change the name. The idea of open access makes it sound like all we care about is people being able to get to an article and read it. And that shuts off, right, the power of people being able to contribute their voice and that full digital reuse of those articles, which, you know, with the explosion of generative AI, we see how important that reuse is. And the business models that are designed to support one aspect of open access, right? Just get to it, but don’t necessarily promote the ability for folks to contribute or reuse is a, that’s a real struggle for us and, you know, for the movement in in general right now. One of the models or some of the models do run the risk of if you enable one portion, you end up introducing barriers that are just as bad as barriers to access if you’re introducing barriers, for example, to being able to contribute your article. If you’re saying, well, we’re going to charge now authors to publish versus readers to access. That’s just replacing one bad problem with another. So that’s a real issue.

Eliza Compton: And is any of that issue related to geography? So, for example, so much science takes place in the global north. And so, we’re talking about, you do a lot of work with international organisations, UNESCO and the UN. Is there a possibility that we’re perpetuating these inequalities because there is this lopsided access to resources at the moment? I don’t know that I phrased that question particularly well. I guess I’m just asking about what the situation is with the global north versus the global south.

Heather Joseph: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. And I think you’re getting to an issue that the open access movement really has to be, has been, and I think has to continue to be to approach in a nuanced way, right? This notion that one business model to support open access is not, that’s not going to fly any more than thinking about how you implement open access, how it’s actually expressed should be different region to region, locale to locale, based on what is good for the local community who is generating scientific information and using scientific information. And that is really a challenge that the community is wrestling with in a wide variety of ways. I would say we tend to think about open access as this monolithic. It simply means taking the current system of communicating via articles in a volume of journals or a journal volume as that’s how you do it. You just make that content free to read, free to contribute to, and free to reuse. And that’s that limits, right? That’s a limitation that assumes that that system is working well for all geographies. The journal system is working fairly well for the global north, but it isn’t something that does anything really to promote science that’s generated in the global south. The editorial decisions tend to be focused on topics of interest to the global north. Languages that our journals are published in is predominantly English, right? This is, it isn’t particularly well suited to encouraging communication in channels and languages and in of topics that are of interest to the global south. So open access as a mechanism won’t solve those problems, but thinking about communicating science and scholarship under open access sort of terms and conditions and what mechanisms are available should be a way for us to encourage more diversity in the kinds of outlets, the kinds of options that are available for different geographies, different communities to be able to publish. That holds true for disciplines as well as geographies, by the way, right? So, you know, one of the things that I like to really emphasize about open access is that the open access movement is about opportunity, right? Opportunity to rethink, to utilize technology to empower individuals, disciplines, communities to communicate more efficiently, effectively, and broadly than we’ve had the ability to do in the past. And I think we sometimes fall into the, well, let’s harp on this particular detail and fight about how that one should get done the right way, rather than recognize that it really is about this sweeping opportunity to change for the better the way scientific and scholarly information can be communicated.

Eliza Compton: Well, it’s really interesting that it’s harnessed, as you mentioned at the very beginning of the conversation, to the development of the internet, which has given us all a very different way of communicating with the rest of the world. I wanted to ask you too about, I think I read earlier today, actually, that about 43% of US research outputs are currently open access. Is your goal to reach 100%? And if so, does that then butt up against things like commercial interests or security?

Heather Joseph: I would say the goal is to make as much of it as open as possible. I think we can’t be absolute in terms of open access. For scientific and scholarly articles, I think the goal is certainly to be closer to 100% than not. It’s very difficult to think of circumstances where, once an author is ready to communicate their article via a journal publication, their work via a journal article, the ideas of commercialization, right, being able to patent ideas, you’ve already cleared that hurdle, right? You’re so far out of the pre-competitive space that that doesn’t come into play once you’re ready to publish. Once you’re ready to publish, you’ve generally not generally cleared any at all security, you know, any of those kinds of interests with your research institution’s process or the federal government’s processes. There should not be issues of national security or of commercialization in the article space. They do exist in the data space, but I think when we’re talking about open access, the open access movement in general, not the open science movement, which comprises data, software, code, the whole kit and caboodle, but just open access to articles, those really aren’t issues that come into play.

Eliza Compton: Okay. Also, you do quite a lot of work and are interested in encouraging early career researchers and students to get involved in participating in increasing impact, sharing research. So do you have any tips for early career researchers, postdocs, about what the best way is to go about sharing their research, how to prioritise outlets, those any kind of advice in that area?

Heather Joseph: I would say that our approach with early career researchers is not so much to give them tips as it is to hear from them, what do they need us to do to help clear the brush so that they can communicate openly, right? The general response from or position of early career folks, students, postdocs, grad students tends to be, I’d prefer to share this stuff from day one as widely as possible, but I can’t because either, you know, my mentor, my academic advisor tells me I need to publish in single title journals or high impact journals, you know, in order to get tenure and promotion, or I’m being told I can’t. So our work with early career folks is really to talk with them and make sure they’re aware that there are opportunities to do things different and then to learn from them where are the barriers that they’re running into that we as advocates, I mean, we’re a library membership organization at our core, but we are an advocacy organization that utilizes the position of libraries on our academic and research campuses to try to then work with university administrators, department chairs, vice chancellors for research to look at those barriers to communicating openly and work together on solutions that’ll clear the brush so the next generation can benefit from that being the norm, that they’re encouraged to work openly, publish openly, communicate openly, and ultimately that they’re rewarded in the meaningful ways, tenure, promotion, funding, for doing so. You know, it’s not so much us like telling students what this is, what you should do. They want to do it. What are you running into? How can we help? And then we try to focus our resources on finding ways to help.

Eliza Compton: And one final question. What are you working on at the moment? What is your next goal on the path to the ideal landscape?

Heather Joseph: So for us, it’s twofold. I mean, one huge priority for us here, SPARC is located in Washington, D.C., so we’re in the U.S. We are deeply committed to ensuring that our libraries and the faculty and students that they serve, that we work with those communities, are helping to make sure that the national US policy, the Nelson Memorandum, which will go into effect at the end of 2025, is implemented in a way that really lives up to empowering the full promise of open access so that the way our federal agencies implement that memorandum with our academic institutions and research institutions is done in a way that it’s not just ensuring that people can get access to the articles and data that result from federally funded research, but that it’s done in an equitable way, right? That’s not leaving anybody out from being able to contribute to that process as well. So that is really our top priority. And I would say the second thing that we’re working on now is looking at really addressing that question of business models to support open publishing, open access publishing head on. We like to say at SPARC, our advocacy should never be around simply telling people, here’s what you should say no to, right? Protest against X. We want to be able to say, here are things you should be able to say yes to instead. So, we’re working very, very, um, uh, uh, very, very, very, very focused on new business models. A colleague of mine, Raym Crow here at SPARC, um, helped to develop actually and is helping to promote the Subscribe to Open model for supporting not-for-profit publishers transitioning from subscription publishing to open access. We’re supporting and promoting mechanisms under the sort of diamond open access umbrella, and we’re helping to organize the next global summit on that, which will be in December. Watch this space. And we’re also, you know, working with a variety of sort of nontraditional communications options, supporting things like pre-print servers, open platform publications that are not, that don’t have that same type of traditional overhead as journals, as mechanisms that can supplement, support, enhance traditional models so that we can have a diversity of models in terms of who pays and how do things get sustained over the long run. So, those are really our primary areas of focus.

Eliza Compton: Great. Well, as you say, watch this space. We look forward to seeing more developments in that area. And just before we go, if people want to find out more about SPARC, where can they do that?

Heather Joseph: We’re online at sparcopen.org. So it’s just our name, S-P-A-R-C, and the word open, all one word, dot org.

Eliza Compton: Great, fantastic. Well, Heather Joseph, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a really terrific conversation.

Heather Joseph: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Eliza Compton: My next guest is a paleontologist with a passion for scholarly communication and knowledge exchange for public benefit. Steven Vidovic is the head of open research and publication practice at the University of Southampton in the UK. His many hats also include chair of the Directory of Open Access Journals advisory board and Southampton’s institutional lead for the UK Reproducibility Network. And he is a member of Jisc’s transitional agreement oversight group. On top of that, he’s written two pieces for Campus: one that takes on the flaws in labels such as bronze OA, and another that gives his perspective on what open research really is. Our chat included what the People, Culture and Environment section in the REF 2029 might mean for trust in and transparency of research and he gives tips for open research best practice.

Eliza Compton: Hi Steven and welcome to the THE podcast.

Steven Vidovic: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Eliza Compton: We’re very pleased to have you here to shed some light on the topic of open research. So, I thought I would ask the most straightforward question to start, which is, what is open research?

Steven Vidovic: Yeah, okay, well, I guess the most simple way of explaining what open research is, is that it’s a collection of research best practices that are optimised for people to be able to access the materials that are output and also to enhance their reproducibility. And by that, I mean that where possible, the materials can be replicated and verified. So, really, just trying to build trust in the research. That can be all sorts of practices from the conception of the research project all the way until after the publication to ensure a life for the research beyond its initial purpose.

Eliza Compton: Great, thank you. And what isn’t open research? So, what do you not include under this umbrella? Are there any notable exceptions or things that might be misunderstood by people?

Steven Vidovic: Well, there’s, because open research is just this kind of nebulous idea of best practices around transparency and reproducibility, there’s a lot of overlap. There’s probably a Venn diagram there somewhere with lots of UK terminology. People are talking about research culture a lot at the moment. And there’s obviously research integrity and accountability. And there’s also aspects of open scholarship, which I would personally exclude. I think it’s quite a personal thing because it is just a term, a collective term, for these practices that enhance the research and its access and reproducibility. So, from that point of view, lots of things can be included, lots of things could be excluded, and it all comes down to a personal choice. An example would be, for example, open educational resources. So, open educational resources I would probably put under open scholarship. However, obviously, open educational resources, which are there to help people enhance their research best practices, would be open research. So, there’s a lot of grey areas, and especially with, as I say, these overlaps with research integrity and research culture. It’s all ultimately all of these things boil down to improving the public’s trust in research and also trying to be more equitable with people’s access to the products of research and learning. And the idea being really that we can give this stuff away for free because the value that institutions add is really the expert delivery of that kind of learning and research material.

Eliza Compton: Interesting. You mentioned research culture. I understand there are, in the UK at least, that there are changes coming up in, for example, the Research Excellence Framework. Are these changes going to affect the culture or the perceptions, use of open research, at least in the UK?

Steven Vidovic: Well, I suppose that’s the intention. So the REF, the Research Excellence Framework, did a Future Research Assessment Programme after the last REF was delivered in 2021. And from that exercise, they realized that the REF is at the very least perceived to change people’s behaviours. And so the intention is to change them for the better. So, in the future REF exercise, which is currently tabled for 2029, the intention is to have what they’ve called the People, Culture and Environment section, which we’re yet to see what that looks like. But the intention is really to demonstrate that the UK funding councils really value people working in a way that’s more transparent and engenders trust in their research. So, from that point of view, we’re pinning quite a few high hopes on this People, Culture and Environment section of the REF. There’s also the publication section. Yesterday, at the time of recording, the sort of proposed changes to the REF open access policy were published alongside a consultation. So, they’re not set in stone yet. But those are indicating a slight acceleration of making materials open to the public by requesting that if something’s not made publicly available on the publisher’s own platform and it’s being made through archiving in a repository, that that’s done slightly quicker than it was in the previous REF exercise. And so that policy only previously applied to journal articles and conference outputs, and they’re now asking for it to apply to long-form outputs, so books and monographs. So from that point of view, there’s this intention to grow the effect of the REF on other output types so that people have more equitable access to the knowledge that’s being created by public funds.

Eliza Compton: And you’re the head of open research and publication practice at the University of Southampton. So you spend all your time talking about these sorts of things. How are these sorts of discussions being had at the researcher level, sort of at the university level rather than the policy level?

Steven Vidovic: Yeah, so I’m actually also the institutional lead for the UK Reproducibility Network, which is a network of institutions who’ve come together to try and advance open research practices. And that operates at two different levels. So, at my level as the institutional lead, it means that I feed into this kind of top-down approach. So, I’ll take learning back from the national network and feed it into sort of executive committee meetings and board meetings, and hope that some of that learning trickles down. But also, each UK Reproducibility Network has a local network, and the idea of that, and that was really the founding principles of the UKRN, was to have these local networks, which were grassroots-up approaches. So, within those small but growing and vibrant communities, there are conversations around what people can be doing to enhance their open research practices. And we’re also currently running a Research England-funded open research programme within the UKRN. So, there are currently 24 partner organisations in the open research programme, and they’re working with their communities to identify training that can be shared across the UK to help embed these practices, methods of evaluation so that we can evaluate the uptake of open research practices, and also sharing and integrating. So, thinking about how institutions share across institutions and within institutions and how we integrate these practices. So, there’s a lot of really interesting work being done across the UK and within institutions at the moment to try and grow awareness of these practices and to enhance them and encourage their uptake. And anyone can get involved in this programme as well. So, we’re having new institutions join us all the time. And also, across the institutions, of course, you know, we don’t want it just to be the institutional leads or the local network leads that are contributing. We’re trying to work with our communities to co-design what the future of open research practice looks like. So, it’s quite an exciting time at the moment.

Eliza Compton: It sounds it. What are some of the examples of the practices that people can do to improve their researchers can do to improve their open research practices?

Steven Vidovic: One thing is really make it very clear what license is on any material that is publicly available because it’s all well and good for people to say anyone can access this. But if people don’t know what their rights as the user are and how they can reuse it and build upon it, then it’s not truly open. So that goes for any output, whether it’s a pre-registration, a data set, or a traditional journal article. Make sure it’s got a really good and clear open license on it. Other things that people can do is engage with research data better. It’s quite often an afterthought that people compile research data into supplementary data and attach it to a paper. But it might be that actually the data set is a much bigger thing that multiple papers and books and other outputs hang off of. And so actually creating really robust data sets that again have embedded licenses and it’s really clear who’s contributed and how it can be reused and managed is a really good thing that can be done. Pre-registrations are an interesting one. There are a few cases where they’re used really well. The idea of a pre-registration is that it keeps the researcher honest, even if we’re all humans, so we can have an idea, go off, do the research, evaluate the research, and then our memories are fallible. And so, even without there being an intention, we can sort of retrofit our ideas to what we found. So, the idea of a pre-registration is that you can actually say, you know, what you’re going to do, what you expect to find, the purpose of what you’re doing, and then you can go back to it and say whether or not that’s been achieved or if a different outcome’s been achieved. And a different outcome is still positive. You know, we don’t have to be perfect. They’re often not used properly. You know, some journals require people to have a pre-registration, and people will go and just create a pre-registration after they’ve already collected the data, etc. And so, in which case, we’re not being honest and we’re just paying lip service to an open research practice, but not using it in the best possible way. So, I think that it would be really nice if people listening to this think about how they could use something like pre-registrations to keep themselves honest and engage with that with the next project that they kick off.

Eliza Compton: Well, that is all excellent advice. Thank you so much, Steven. I have one final question for you, which might be a short one or a long one. We’re running out of time and our time together. Is there any reason to be concerned about artificial intelligence in terms of open research and perhaps work being used to feed, I don’t know, large language models or technology of this kind?

Steven Vidovic: It’s a very complicated question. And at the moment, whenever anyone mentions this, it kills a meeting because then the whole meeting becomes about this topic. So I guess my interpretation of it is that I’d like to be optimistic and it can be a really positive thing. By having open licenses on your material, it will mean that the machine, and especially if those licenses are machine-readable, which is really important, then the artificial intelligence can go and digest that information and build upon it, which can do good for public benefit. You know, especially if it’s doing things like creating systematic reviews and it helps to synthesize our current medical awareness on a particular subject, for example, that would be invaluable to us. It’s also, but that is the point: it needs to be, you know, there has to be good practice around what we’re doing so that the machine reading can also carry forward that good practice and produce valuable assets to us. It can obviously be misused, but there have always been issues around research integrity and accountability, and there always will be, unfortunately. It’s just that the tools that people are using are becoming more sophisticated. Likewise, some of the examples that we’ve seen more recently have been clearly machine-written papers that have been published in the open access literature. And that is possibly because there’s probably two drivers there. There’s the fact that there’s reward and recognition for publishing papers. If you publish papers, you get a nice publication list, you have a good CV, you get a job, you get a promotion. So there is effectively a commoditization of research outputs going on, and there’s a negative driver there. So people might be using AI to produce research more quickly than they could do in their normal day-to-day business. And there’s an issue around accountability there, because even if what they’re doing is trying to improve the quality of the writing or speed up the writing, and they’ve actually done all the work themselves, they still need to be able to check and verify the outputs of the AI. If they can’t do that, then there’s concerns around this. And, you know, we’ve got papers published saying, literally, with sentences in them, saying, I’m an AI model and I can’t verify this. And so there’s these publications that then undermine people’s trust in them because somebody’s not been thorough enough to go through and verify what has been written. But similarly, there are people who can make really valuable contributions to research who English might not be their first language. And unfortunately, English is the predominant language of science presently. And so AI can be used to help them create better quality research outputs. So it’s good in that sense. So it’s about how it’s used and misused. And the other thing is that there are people who are trying to undermine the credibility of publishers who they view as trying to publish low-quality outputs for a profit, which may or may not be true. And so they’re using AI-generated outputs to demonstrate that point. And so that’s also another misuse of AI. So really, it’s not the AI that’s at fault, it’s the users. But I shall stop now because otherwise I could go on for another few days.

Eliza Compton: Well, I really appreciate the detail and the insight. And I do feel like each question could have been perhaps a podcast all of its own. Steven, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been really great talking to you.

Steven Vidovic: Thank you very much, Eliza.

Eliza Compton: That’s it for this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast. Thanks for listening. If you have any ideas for future episodes, please get in touch at eliza.compton@timeshighereducation.com. We’ll see you next time.

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