The Bookseller: “Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year. The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.  The Society of Authors said it is “concerned to see publishers signing deals with tech companies without consulting authors and creators first”. Dr Ruth Alison Clemens, a lecturer in modern English literature whose work has been published by Taylor & Francis and Routledge, claimed authors hadn’t been contacted about the AI deal. Clemens told The Bookseller : “I only found out about this via word of mouth in the past few days. I was shocked that they had not publicised this more widely to their authors, as the use of AI and LLMs is a prominent concern for academic researchers today.” A spokesman from the Taylor & Francis group, which is owned by Informa—a FTSE 100 international B2B Events, B2B Digital Services and Academic Markets group—confirmed to The Bookseller that “it is providing Microsoft non-exclusive access to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems”. The agreement, details of which were published by Informa during a trading update in May, states that Informa will be paid $10m+ for “an initial data access” of the works it has the rights to, with a recurring payment of an undisclosed sum to be made over the subsequent three years.  When contacted by The Bookseller, Taylor & Francis said it is “protecting the integrity of our authors’ work and limits on verbatim text reproduction, as well as authors’ rights to receive royalty payments in accordance with their author contracts”. Informa is expecting revenues to reach just shy of £3.5bn in the current financial year, up from £3.2bn in 2023. Taylor & Francis, with its portfolio of specialist publishing brands (Routledge, CRC Press, F1000), revealed in March that its revenues went up 4.3% for 2023 to £619m, with adjusted operating profit up 4.4% to £217.9m…”