The Scholarly Kitchen: The Third Time is NOT the Charm — Who Will Own How AI Participates in Scholarship? (Guest Post)

We're pleased to share that Jonathan Woahn has co-authored a new guest post on The Scholarly Kitchen with Wendy Queen, Chief Transformation Officer at Johns Hopkins University Press and former Director of Project MUSE.

Scholarly publishing has twice built the shared infrastructure and then watched someone else own the layer built on top of it. After digitization, commercial aggregators came to own most of the reader and library relationships. After the community built the citation graph, Google came to own discovery. The piece argues that a third layer is forming right now, and that it will decide how AI participates in scholarship rather than simply how it accesses content.

Key Topics

The article explores:

• The Question Has Changed — Why the framing has moved from "How can AI access our content?" to "How should AI participate in scholarship?" now that AI systems synthesize and reason across the literature instead of pointing readers toward it
• Trust Markers Versus Conduct — Why peer review, persistent identifiers, licensing and the version of record describe what a work is without obliging any AI system to act accordingly
• The Coordination Problem — Why no single organization holds everything an AI system would need in order to behave well, and how that gap produces a thicket of one-off bilateral integrations
• Why Three Years Is Too Long — What the pace of AI adoption and revenue growth implies for shared infrastructure that arrives three years from now

The piece argues that "Good behavior today is a happy accident. Good behavior tomorrow must become the standard."

Read the full guest post on The Scholarly Kitchen