Copyright & Licensing 

9 July, 2024

By way of this Statement, STM seeks to address individuals, organisations, and entities who are involved in training, developing and operating AI models, STM’s fuller position on artificial intelligence is further elaborated in corollary documents. 

At STM we support our members in their mission to advance trusted research worldwide. Our more than 150 members collectively publish 66% of all journal articles and tens of thousands of monographs and reference works. Our members work together to serve society by developing standards and technology to ensure research outputs are of high quality, trustworthy and easy to access. We promote the contribution that publishers make to innovation, openness and the sharing of knowledge and embrace change to support the growth and sustainability of the research ecosystem. 

Many of STM’s members have technology departments and have been designing and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in their work streams and products for as long as AI has been used in innovation sectors. Our member publishers are keen to harness AI’s benefits in myriad ways. They also seek to support the development of AI by others to also harness the accuracy and integrity of information by licensing their content to other responsible AI developers, while keeping legal and ethical guardrails firmly in mind. 

One such guardrail is copyright law. As the organizations that manage the review, editing, curation, enrichment, distribution, and financing of the output of high-quality content upon which AI models have the technological capacity to train and produce trusted and reliable output, STM’s members are proud of the value they provide in ensuring the reliability and integrity of research outputs and the ultimate trustworthiness of the scientific record. Generative AI that builds on scientific and scholarly content has the potential to contribute to impactful discoveries and analyses that address and provide solutions to the grand challenges facing humanity. STM champions a vision of truthful, responsible, and reliable AI systems at scale and we and our members look forward to continuing to collaborate with new and existing stakeholders to achieve this. 

The unlicensed use of STM’s members’ content in the training, development, and operation of AI models is of great concern to STM and to our members. Because STM’s members do not share a single jurisdiction, the particular actions and practices of a given AI developer with respect to a given domestic copyright law are too varied to enumerate here. However, regardless of legal nuances among jurisdictions, STM considers the conclusion to be the same – the collection of our members’ content and its use in AI training without authorization, compensation or attribution, amounts to infringement. We support the statements about third parties’ use of content in generative AI training and development that have been made by our sister organizations the International Publishers Association and the UK Publishers Association.