Since Utah’s sweeping sensitive materials law took effect in 2022, certain school districts and public charters throughout the state have individually decided to ban over 262 books from their shelves.
Now, those local decisions could lead to books being banned from every public school in the state, under a new law that takes effect July 1 and applies retroactively.
“Please be aware that at this time, no material has been removed statewide,” the Utah State Board of Education said in an email sent to superintendents and charter directors Tuesday.
But that could soon change — once school board leaders figure out how exactly to apply the new law retroactively.
Report: “School Districts Await Statewide Book Ban List As Utah Plans To Retroactively Enforce New Law”
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Announces Launch of Infra Finder: “Your Hub for Finding Infrastructure Services Enabling Open Research and Scholarship”
From an Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Post:
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest resource: Infra Finder. This tool is designed to be the go-to resource for anyone navigating the complex landscape of infrastructure services and standards enabling open research and scholarship.
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Infra Finder currently offers a database that features a wealth of information about 57 infrastructure services and standards that showcase the variety in open practices that enable the open sharing of research data and publications.
From repository software to persistent identifiers, Infra Finder provides information on services’ technical attributes, community engagement mechanisms, governance, key policies, and more – to help you discover and identify the infrastructure services that fit your and your institution’s requirements.
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- How did you choose the first group of services to be included in Infra Finder?
For the current release, we decided to focus on infrastructure services enabling the sharing of research data and publications. This is a shared focus across all of our current core programmes of work. It allows us to better align our research, community engagement, and strategic support efforts. We see increasing the visibility of infrastructure services in this area and advancing their adoption as key to furthering the aims of policies including the Nelson memo in the US and UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science. Within this focus, we invited 84 service providers to participate. Some of these 84 services expressed interest in being part of the tool, and others we are engaging with through ongoing research efforts (e.g. the “reasonable costs” project). Out of the 84 providers, we received responses from 57 services. This is just the beginning – we will continue to add more infrastructure services to Infra Finder. If you are interested in adding your infrastructure service to Infra Finder, please see this page for more information.- How does Infra Finder relate to other registries, assessment tools, and values and principles frameworks in the scholarly communication and research data space?
Infra Finder is built on previous and current efforts to map and bring visibility to the landscape of infrastructure services and technologies for research and scholarship. It was also heavily inspired by existing registries and values and principles frameworks in the space. These efforts include the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCAT), the Principles of Open Scholarship Infrastructure (POSI), the FOREST framework, re3data, fairsharing.org, the EOSC marketplace, and many others. We are grateful to all who have contributed to these resources. In creating Infra Finder, we chose to take a solutions-oriented, user-driven approach to increase the adoption of open infrastructure in a scalable way. For more about this approach, please refer to our documentation on Infra Finder’s background.
Direct to Infra Finder
Learn More, Read the Complete Post, Access FAQs (about 1500 words)
Direct to Infra Finder Documentation
VOA Video: “Librarians in Ukraine and Their Wartime Struggle to Save Libraries”
From the Voice of America (VOA):
In Ukraine, more than 200 libraries have been destroyed and about 400 damaged since Russia launched its war, say Ukrainian officials. Lesia Bakalets reports from Kyiv on how librarians are trying to ensure libraries survive the war.
Preprint: “The Files are in the Computer: Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI”
The essay (preprint) linked below was recently shared on arXiv.
Title
The Files are in the Computer: Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI
Authors
A. Feder Cooper
Cornell University
James Grimmelmann
Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School
Source
via arXiv
DOI: arXiv:2404.12590
April 19, 2024
Abstract
A central issue in copyright lawsuits against generative-AI companies is the degree to which a generative-AI model does or does not “memorize” the data it was trained on. Unfortunately, the debate has been clouded by ambiguity over what “memorization” is, leading to legal debates in which participants often talk past one another. In this essay, we attempt to bring clarity to the conversation over memorization.
From the Essay
We take no position on what the most appropriate copyright regimes for generative-AI systems should be, and we express no opinion on how pending copyright lawsuits should be decided. Our goal is merely to describe how these systems work so that copyright scholars can develop their theories of generative AI on a firm technical foundation. We seek clarity, precision, and technical accuracy.
Access to Full Text Essay
39 pages; PDF.
Research Article (Preprint): “The Emerging AI Divide in the United States”
The preprint linked below was recently share on arXiv.
Title
The Emerging AI Divide in the United States
Authors
Source
via arXiv
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2404.11988
Abstract
The digital divide describes disparities in access to and usage of digital tooling between social and economic groups. Emerging generative artificial intelligence tools, which strongly affect productivity, could magnify the impact of these divides. However, the affordability, multi-modality, and multilingual capabilities of these tools could also make them more accessible to diverse users in comparison with previous forms of digital tooling. In this study, we characterize spatial differences in U.S. residents’ knowledge of a new generative AI tool, ChatGPT, through an analysis of state- and county-level search query data. In the first six months after the tool’s release, we observe the highest rates of users searching for ChatGPT in West Coast states and persistently low rates of search in Appalachian and Gulf states. Counties with the highest rates of search are relatively more urbanized and have proportionally more educated, more economically advantaged, and more Asian residents in comparison with other counties or with the U.S. average. In multilevel models adjusting for socioeconomic and demographic factors as well as industry makeup, education is the strongest positive predictor of rates of search for generative AI tooling. Although generative AI technologies may be novel, early differences in uptake appear to be following familiar paths of digital marginalization.
Direct to Full Text
April 18, 2024
21 pages; PDF.
Journal Article: “Benefits Of Open Access to Researchers From Lower-Income Countries: A Global Analysis of Reference Patterns in 1980–2020”
The article linked below was recently published by the Journal of Information Science.
Title
Authors
Dag W Aksnes
Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Norway
Fredrik N Piro
Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Norway
Source
Journal of Information Science (2024)
DOI: 10.1177/01655515241245952
Abstract
The main objective of the open access (OA) movement is to make scientific literature freely available to everyone. This may be of particular importance to researchers in lower-income countries, who often face barriers due to high subscription costs. In this article, we address this issue by analysing over time the reference lists of scientific publications around the world. Our study focuses on key issues, including whether researchers from lower-income countries reference fewer publications in their research and how this trend evolves over time. We also investigate whether researchers from lower-income countries rely more on the literature that is openly available through different OA routes compared with other researchers. Our study revealed that the proportion of OA references has increased over time for all publications and country groups. However, publications from lower-income countries have seen a higher growth rate of OA-based references, suggesting that the emergence of OA publishing has been particularly advantageous to researchers in these countries.
Direct to Full Text