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NISO Plus Pre-conferences Advance Solutions to AI Challenges

NISO Plus Pre-conferences Advance Solutions to AI Challenges

January 2026

As AI technologies and their applications continue to develop rapidly, there is a growing need for guidelines and best practices for using them effectively and responsibly. And for scholarly publishing, there's no better place to explore potential new guidelines than NISO Plus Baltimore (February 16–18)! The conference program features not only several sessions on AI, but also two half-day, workshop-style pre-conferences bringing community members together to brainstorm and seed ideas for advancing solutions to challenges in AI and scholarly communications. 

Our morning session covers managing access for AI agents to content, and the afternoon pre-conference addresses tracking AI usage. This is a great opportunity to join a community conversation about how to move the industry forward in developing better infrastructure and policies for AI in scholarly publishing. 

For the year running, NISO Plus in Baltimore will also host JATS-Con as a full-day pre-conference. Running concurrently with the AI workshops, JATS-Con is the users meeting for the Journal Article Tag Suite. Participants will explore the latest use (or non-use) cases for JATS or its extensions, such as the Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS), TaxPub, or the Standards Tag Suite (STS). Stay tuned for the 2026, program, coming soon.

For updates on sessions and speakers, see our pre-conference page on the NISO Plus website. Registration is affordable, at only $99 for our half-day sessions and $159 for JATS-Con. Whether AI or JATS is your scholarly publishing jam, don't miss this chance to take part in the conversations that lead to new NISO standards and projects!

 

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 machine access ingesting 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

  • Tony Alves, HighWire
  • Todd Carpenter, NISO
  • Marjorie Hllava, Access Innovations
  • 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

  • Todd Carpenter, NISO
  • Tasha Mellins-Cohen, COUNTER
  • Michelle Urberg, LibLynx

JATS-Con 2026

 February 16, 9:00 am–5:00 pm

JATS-Con is a conference for anyone who uses, or is interested in learning about, the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), an XML format for marking up and exchanging journal content. JATS is an ANSI/NISO standard and is formally designated as ANSI/NISO Z39.96. The program will be announced soon.

Conference presentations are peer-reviewed and result in a final paper that is archived.