**Apologies for cross posting**

Join us on Monday, February 16 for a day of NISO Plus pre-conferences on challenges and opportunities in AI in scholarly publishing! This is a great opportunity to help shape emerging best practices for using AI in the information community. Each workshop-style session will feature interactive breakout groups to foster brainstorming and collaboration. 

Pre-conference I

Keeping the Robots in Line: Provisioning AI Access to Content

Monday, February 16 | 8:30 am–12:00 pm

Over the past year, there has been an explosion of web traffic to content sites driven by the ingestion of content for AI tools. Publishers, repositories, content aggregators, and platform providers all have reasons—and sometimes business cases—to allow agentic AI to access their content. A publisher may choose to license some of its content to an LLM developer, or to provide subscribed access to users who want to use AI tools. An open access repository may allow researchers to use AI to ingest its content and produce summaries or datasets. Whatever the case, allowing AI to access your content raises important security, systems stability, and interoperability issues, such as how to allow wanted AI agents in while keeping the unwanted out. In this session, speakers and participants will consider a range of ideas for managing AI access to content, with the goal of identifying possible best practices that work across the community to maintain service levels for humans while providing access to the robots.

Speakers include Tony Alves, HighWire; Todd Carpenter, NISO; and Jessica Miles, The Informed Frontier

Pre-conference II

Tracking Usage in the Age of AI

Monday, February 16 | 1:00–5:00 pm

Measuring the impact of scholarly content is critical for publishers, who must demonstrate its value to libraries and other stakeholders. Traditionally, online usage tracking was focused primarily on human activity, but machine usage of content can no longer be deprioritized; when assessing the impact of a particular title or collection, content providers and libraries are eager to capture all available data, including uses by AI. However, not all AI uses are alike: some represent a human end-user, while others originate from bots indiscriminately scraping sites for data. Stakeholders must consider iImportant questions about the different types of machine usage, such as search, summarization, and synthesis with AI tools, and how that usage might be counted and assessed differently. In this pre-conference, speakers and participants will explore how developing best practices for counting and reporting AI usage could be adapted and extended for a variety of scholarly platforms and applications. Attendees will learn about existing work as well as newly developing approaches and plan additional efforts to define AI usage for publishers and other content repositories.

Speakers include Todd Carpenter, NISO; Tasha Mellins-Cohen, COUNTER; and Michelle Urberg, LibLynx.

The day promises to be a productive one for those working to identify best practices for leveraging AI technologies effectively and responsibly. Register now to secure your place, and consider staying for the rest of the NISO Plus conference, which includes additional sessions on AI as well as interactive discussions on metadata, research integrity, open research infrastructure, and more. Check our conference website for updates, and book your room at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront for the conference rate!

Best wishes,