We are pleased to bring you an array of keynote speakers and panelists to discuss important issues related to this year’s theme, “Critical Thinking and Evolving Open Scholarship in the Era of AI.”
Opening Plenary – followed by this Keynote presentation:
“The Importance of the ENVISAGE Principles and PILOT Principles for AI Governance in Science Communications”
Monday, July 27th
9:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific time (UCT-7)
This event will begin with 20-30 minutes of welcome remarks from FSCI Organizers, followed by the following Opening Plenary, The Importance of the ENVISAGE Principles and PILOT Principles for AI Governance in Science Communications.
by Dr Jacintha Toohey and Francis P. Crawley
Abstract:
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into scholarly communication requires governance frameworks that are both ethically grounded and operationally actionable. This keynote introduces a layered approach through the ENVISAGE Principles and the PILOT Principles, which together provide a coherent architecture for responsible AI governance in science. The ENVISAGE Principles articulate a constitutive ethical compass rooted in shared human values such as dignity, justice, solidarity, and responsibility, offering a clear orientation for societies, institutions, and research communities. Complementing this, the PILOT Principles translate ethical ambition into implementable policy and engineering requirements, ensuring that AI systems are purposeful, possess integrity, are lawful, open, and tested. This integrated approach creates a dynamic and iterative relationship between ethical reflection and operational practice, aligning AI development with open science, data stewardship, and global research collaboration.
Beyond governance in a narrow sense, these frameworks illuminate a deeper transformation: AI is reshaping the conditions under which knowledge itself is produced, evaluated, and trusted. AI-mediated systems increasingly influence what is visible, credible, and actionable in scholarly ecosystems, raising fundamental questions about epistemic authority, responsibility, and the role of human judgement. This keynote therefore situates the ENVISAGE and PILOT Principles within the broader context of evolving open scholarship, emphasizing the need to sustain critical thinking, epistemic humility, and scholarly responsibility in environments where automation, probabilistic reasoning, and agentic AI are becoming pervasive. In doing so, it connects governance not only to compliance and design, but to the preservation of trustworthy knowledge practices in the Age of AI.
This presentation will be recorded. After recording stops, there will be a Q&A period.
Dr Jacintha Toohey is a legal academic and researcher on the ethical-legal, policy and human rights governance in research. Based at the School of Law University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with over two decades of experience in law, ethics, policy, and global research collaboration, Jacintha’s work focuses on research ethics and integrity, data governance, and the regulatory implications of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. She holds a PhD in Law and has contributed to major international initiatives such as the TRUST Global Code of Conduct and Fair Research Contracting frameworks, advancing equitable and responsible research partnerships. With experience in multi-country programmes, thought-leadership, policy development, and capacity strengthening across national research institutions, Africa and globally, Jacintha serves on institutional and international research and governance bodies. Her current scholarship critically engages ethico-legal considerations in supporting responsible, trustworthy and inclusive knowledge systems in the evolving research landscape.
Francis P. Crawley is a philosopher specializing in research ethics, research integrity, and the governance of data and artificial intelligence, with expertise in scholarly communication and research assessment in open science. He is Co-chair and Coordinator of the CoARA Ethics and Research Integrity Policy in Responsible Research Assessment for Data and Artificial Intelligence (ERIP) Working Group and Co-chair and Principal Investigator of the EOSC-Future Research Data Alliance Artificial Intelligence and Data Visitation Working Group, where he contributes to developing frameworks that integrate ethical principles, transparency, and accountability into AI-mediated research and evaluation systems. He has extensive experience working with international organisations, including the European Commission, UNESCO, WHO, and the Research Data Alliance, as an ethics and project evaluator and policy contributor, shaping approaches to responsible research assessment, data governance, and open scholarship across global contexts. At KU Leuven, he was responsible for the BA, MA, and doctoral programs in Philosophy, taught Research Ethics and Integrity, and contributed to the reform of doctoral education and evaluation frameworks. His current work focuses on how AI is transforming the production, communication, and assessment of knowledge, and on advancing human-centred, ethically grounded approaches to scholarly communication and research evaluation.
Closing Plenary Panel – AI: Pedagogical Partner or Scholarly Disruptor?
Friday, July 31st
8:00 AM – 10:00 AM Pacific time (UCT-7)
Abstract:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the landscape of teaching, learning, and scholarly communication, prompting a critical question: does AI function primarily as a pedagogical partner or as a scholarly disruptor? This panel brings together educators, researchers, and information professionals to examine the dual roles of AI in academic ecosystems, exploring how these technologies can enhance student learning, expand access to knowledge, and support innovative forms of inquiry, while also challenging longstanding norms around authorship, assessment, intellectual labor, and research integrity. Panelists will present diverse perspectives on the opportunities and risks associated with AI integration, including its impact on epistemic trust, reproducibility, and the valuation of human expertise. Through case studies, practical experiences, and forward-looking analysis, the discussion will highlight emerging strategies for responsibly incorporating AI into pedagogical and scholarly workflows. Attendees will gain insight into how institutions can navigate this evolving terrain by fostering AI literacy, rethinking evaluation practices, and developing policies that balance innovation with rigor. The session aims to equip participants with conceptual frameworks and actionable approaches for engaging AI as both a transformative tool and a subject of critical inquiry within the future of scholarly communication.
Speakers:
- Shana Pote
- Nassima Berrezouane
- Hande Kucuk McGinty
- Aaron Tay
Shana Pote is a doctoral candidate, educator, and executive coach whose work focuses on how emerging technologies reshape human judgment, authorship, and knowledge production. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania, and has designed and facilitated courses and workshops for academic, civic, and professional audiences across higher education, nonprofits, and industry. Shana is currently completing her Ph.D. in Human Development at Fielding Graduate University, where her research examines the impacts of AI on doctoral education, with particular attention to how AI-mediated knowledge production is reshaping notions of authorship, legitimacy, assessment, and academic identity at the individual, institutional, and disciplinary levels. While her empirical focus is on doctoral education, her work is intentionally framed within broader sociotechnical and futures-oriented scholarship on AI, institutions, and knowledge work.
Nassima Berrazouane is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tiaret, Algeria, where her research examines how Artificial Intelligence can optimize access to digital scholarly content and enhance information discovery. A Computer Science Engineer with over a decade of experience in managing large-scale academic infrastructures, she currently serves as Head of the Systems and Networks Center at the University of Algiers 2. She has led major digital transformation projects, including the governance of e-learning platforms serving 45,000 users and the implementation of advanced institutional repositories. Her work sits at the intersection of AI, knowledge engineering, and scholarly communication.
Hande Kucuk McGinty, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Kansas State University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Miami, and her M.S. in Computer Science from Eastern Michigan University. She graduated from Bilkent University in Turkey with a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering. She has a long history of working with interdisciplinary teams. Her most recent research focuses on food and agriculture informatics and ontologies as well as bioinformatics and bio-ontologies and their applications for artificial intelligence and machine learning. She previously worked on designing and implementing ontologies such as an ontology backend for USDA’s Food Data Central, BioAssay Ontology (BAO), and Drug Target Ontology (DTO), as well as generating methods for bridging multiple domains and analysis of data using AI. Her research also involves creating methodologies that allow us to better acquire, represent, and reuse knowledge from publicly available data. Her research interests include artificial intelligence including Trustworthy AI, analysis and representation of big data, biological networks in bioinformatics tools, clustering algorithms, and bioinformatics algorithms.
Aaron Tay is an academic librarian whose work sits at the intersection of scholarly communication, research support, information retrieval, and emerging AI technologies. He currently leads research and data services at Singapore Management University Libraries, where he works with researchers, educators, and librarians to strengthen research capability across the academic lifecycle. Aaron has written and spoken extensively on AI-powered search, literature discovery, bibliometrics, research evaluation, and the changing role of libraries in scholarly workflows, and has conducted sold out workshops on AI & information retrieval to researchers and librarians. He is particularly interested in how large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, and agentic systems are reshaping how students and researchers discover, evaluate, and synthesize knowledge.
Closing Plenary B: Closing remarks from FSCI Organizers, followed by this final Keynote Presentation:
When We Said “Open,” We Didn’t Mean “OpenAI”: OA, Megacorps, and the Illusion of Control
by Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance
Friday, July 31st
11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific time (UCT-7)
Abstract:
Many of us have spent years advocating for openness. By that we meant open access to scholarship, open source software, open educational resources, open data, open infrastructure — the collective project of making the accumulated record of human knowledge available to anyone who wants to learn from it, build on it, or put it to uses we haven’t imagined yet. This effort has been in the belief, grounded in centuries of experience, that broad access to knowledge produces benefits that are diffuse, compounding, and largely incalculable in advance. “Open,” we did not think, meant helping build trillion-dollar megacorps that are building server farms the size of Manhattan. Or tools that create and share on social media an ongoing stream of synthetic child pornography. Or autonomous killing agents deployed by the military. And yet, here we are.
As AI companies scrape scholarly collections with abandon, institutions and individuals long committed to openness are tempted to respond by exerting more control and placing barriers on access to scholarship. I argue that reaching for control is usually a trap. Fair use and open licensing are critical for advancing research (including research using AI), and pulling back from those permissive allowances will harm the advancement of learning and knowledge, while simultaneously entrenching, rather than weakening, the position of those large corporations that currently dominate the AI ecosystem. The better answer is the one we’ve used before: build open infrastructure that supports accountable research.
Dave Hansen is the Executive Director of Authors Alliance. Prior to joining the Authors Alliance, Dave was an Associate University Librarian and Lead for Copyright & Information Policy at Duke University Libraries, where he was responsible for core research and collections support for faculty and students. Dave has testified before Congress, the U.S. Copyright Office, and the USPTO on copyright, AI, open access, and fair use issues affecting academic authors and universities. He has extensive experience teaching and advising researchers, publishers, and librarians on copyright, fair use, and authors rights. He received his JD and MSLS from UNC Chapel Hill.
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