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.

For those unfamiliar with it, scholarly publishing is often (primarily, even) not a for-profit enterprise for most academics. Most receive no remuneration for their work, and neither do most peer reviewers or academics serving on editorial boards, though there are notable exceptions. Many authors pay out of pocket for image rights, editing, or in some cases article processing fees that can stretch to the thousands to publish a single article Open Access with a major publisher. Most of this is "business as usual," with the remuneration ostensibly coming in prestige and tertiary benefits that are intended to accrue to full-time tenured positions in colleges and universities, although these positions have dwindled in number in most fields, almost entirely vanished in others. Publishers [SLPDF] argue that they provide various benefits that justify all of this.