Name: How Open Should Open Be? The AI Question for Archives, Repositories, and Open Scholarship
Start: 2026-10-07T15:00:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T16:05:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

How Open Should Open Be? The AI Question for Archives, Repositories, and Open Scholarship

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 4:05pm EDT

3 Room I

ID: 34865

Libraries, archives, and mission-driven publishers have been key players in the global movement to increase open and equitable access to scholarship and to primary source materials. One key question that stewards of archival and general collections, and publishers of scholarly content, must wrestle with today is whether the principles behind making content open for individual readers and users can be applied to LLMs and generative AI tools. Concerns over loss of provenance, control, and lack of attribution bump up against a conviction that the high quality content stewarded by research libraries, archives, and scholarly publishers would enhance the quality of output produced by AI tools. As AI systems seek access to scholarly content for training data, long-standing assumptions and values about openness, stewardship, control and provenance are being challenged and reexamined. In this panel discussion, we bring together different perspectives on the core question of whether and how scholarly content should be open for AI use.Panelists:Dave Hansen, Executive Director of Authors Alliance, argues that control and gatekeeping are the wrong approach for libraries and archives, and instead asserts that “building the infrastructure that supports open, accountable research of every kind.” will be the most values-aligned and productive role for the library community.Alison Muddit, Chief Executive Officer of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), asserts that AI and open access are not naturally in tension; but/and that a mission-driven publisher like PLOS must take seriously the fact that AI intensifies the need for rigor, transparency, and signals of trustworthiness. She emphasizes the responsibility to ensure that the scholarly record functions as trustworthy infrastructure for both human and machine reasoning.Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries at MIT, is a global leader in open scholarship and an advocate for the public mission of knowledge institutions. At MIT, she is co-chair of the MIT Working Group on Scholarly Content and Generative AI, and a member of the MIT Committee on AI in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. Panel facilitator: Mike Furlough, Executive Director of HathiTrust, works with dozens of member libraries to steward over 19 million digitized items from their collections, recognizing that memory institutions have a responsibility to make collections broadly accessible for all modes of research. However, emergent modes of research have brought new, more urgent demands for access to those collections, which in turn pose new questions regarding sustainable stewardship.

Speakers

Chris Bourg

Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chris Bourg is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Prior to assuming her role at MIT, Chris worked for 12 years in the Stanford University... Read More →

Mike Furlough

Executive Director, HathiTrust

Furlough leads an organization that includes over 90 academic and research institutions working to transform scholarship and research in the 21st century. The partnering institutions currently own and maintain a trusted digital repository of more than 11 million volumes, digitized... Read More →

Dave Hansen

Executive Director, Authors Alliance

David Hansen is the Executive Director of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to support authors who want to see their works widely distributed for the benefit of the public. Authors Alliance has led efforts to secure copyright exemptions for text data mining researchers and has... Read More →

Alison Muddit

Chief Executive Officer, Public Library of Science

Since June 2017 Alison has been Chief Executive Officer of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), an organization on a mission to drive open science forward with measurable, meaningful change in research publishing, policy, and practice. Prior to PLOS, Alison served as Executive Director... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 4:05pm EDT
3 Room I MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Panel

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Innovating Open Content to Democratize Knowledge

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OEGlobal 2026

Chris Bourg

Mike Furlough

Dave Hansen

Alison Muddit

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Success you have shared X tickets.

OEGlobal 2026

Chris Bourg

Mike Furlough

Dave Hansen

Alison Muddit

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