At the INCONECSS 2025 conference - a major international event for librarians and information professionals - Prof. Dr. Julia Priess-Buchheit (Kiel University, IP4OS) took part in the panel “Scholarly Publications, Ownership and AI: Publishers Selling Content to LLM Creators.”

The session examined how publishers are increasingly selling scholarly publications to companies training large language models (LLMs), a practice related to significant revenues. Panellists debated the legal and ethical challenges of these deals, including whether they align with author agreements signed long before AI was a factor.

Julia Priess-Buchheit contributed her perspective from IP4OS, emphasising that librarians - one of the key professional groups in the project’s multi-professional team approach - are at the forefront of these debates. She underlined the need for stronger capacity building and transparent frameworks that equip librarians and other professionals to guide researchers in the era of AI.

By linking these discussions to IP4OS’s broader mission, her contribution underscored how empowering librarians and allied professions is essential to ensuring that scholarly communication remains fair, secure, and innovation-friendly.