News Summary

• Should researchers still be posting their data openly online?
• It’s a question being debated by some researchers now that bots are routinely mining open-access databases and scientific publications to train artificial-intelligence tools.
• 90% of open access data repositories part of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories encounter bot scraping.
• Some researchers argue that the potential of automated science to be used for scientific ‘good’ means that open data should remain open.
• But others point to evidence that bots scraping complex data sets can contribute to low-quality research and AI slop.