How Should We Keep the Robots in Line? NISO Plus Attendees Weigh In

The Challenge of Machines as Readers

On Monday, February 16, the 2026 NISO Plus meeting in Baltimore hosted two pre-conferences on challenges in AI in scholarly communications. The first, “Keeping the Robots in Line: Provisioning Access to AI Content,” addressed the problem of allowing some AI agents to ingest content while keeping unwanted AI agents out. The second, “Tracking Usage in the Age of AI,” focused on the counting AI usage across collections and platforms and distinguishing human- from nonhuman activity. Chris Reid, Senior Director at Wiley, attended both sessions and outlined his takeaways on LinkedIn:

Many great insights were shared, but two stuck out:

Machines read differently from humans. To deliver content efficiently, publishers need to implement a dedicated architecture that both conveys the necessary information and protects it. ...

The second is the continued, but evolving, need for a new content protection stack. Serving content to machines means protecting content from unauthorized, unscrupled, machines.
 

Structuring AI Access to Knowledge

Tony Alves, Senior Vice President, Product Management at HighWire, was also present on the pre-conference days (and was a speaker in "Keeping the Robots in Line"). In a blog post written during the conference, Alves shared his thoughts following the sessions, noting that AI is already well embedded in the ecosystem, and that the challenge really lies in building the infrastructure—and standards—to ensure that robots "operate within clearly signaled rights frameworks, preserve attribution, respect provenance, and maintain the integrity of the scholarly record."

Our thanks to both Chris and Tony for joining us at NISO Plus and sharing their insights with the wider community!