Roundtable "Culture of Innovations - Legal Decisions for Scientific Libraries as Supported by Latest Technologies"
April 7th, 2023 at the E-resources reading room of the library of Kutafin Moscow State Law University there took place roundtable "Culture of Innovations — Legal Decisions for Scientific Libraries as Supported by Latest Technologies". The event was organized in co-partnership with the Central methodology room on library and bibliography work of the establishments of higher education of the Scientific library of Moscow State University under the aegis of the 10th Moscow Law Forum "Sustainable Development of Russia — Legal Dimension".
Representatives of scientific, library and business organizations gathered to discuss general issues of copyright and library work in that context, problems of using neural networks for compiling texts of research papers. There were also dealt with such matters as standardization in the contemporary environment (with the focus on the national standards as they were under way) and a large-scale role of libraries in implementing the concept of sustainable development.
The meeting was given a start by Beniamin A. Shakhnazarov, doctor of Law, associate professor of the Department of Intellectual Property Rights and the Department of International Law of Kutafin Moscow State Law University. The chosen theme of protection of theses rights turned out to be timely and hot. Mr Shakhnazarov pointed out that not only theses were incopyright items, but any kind of intellectual or creative piece of writing was, be that the thesis published before the defence procedure or a feature in a scientific journal. All the aforementioned works needed protection, and intellectual property rights on all those works would often be infringed. The speaker was well aware of the fact that theses and author's abstracts were sold, and that illegal business was organized from abroad thus unreachable for law enforcement structures.
Another subject Beniamin Alexandrovich gave prominence to was priority of rights, which was particularly important for the scientists occupied in the sphere of research and development works.
Sergey V. Sokolov, head of the Scientific and Research Department of Library Science of the Fundamental Library of INION RAN, told about knowledge and research management. Among other issues touched upon there had to be mentioned system of standards in information, library work and publishing as they were set for the moment of speaking. Mr Sokolov reminded the audience about bodies conceptualizing standards for information and documentation at the international level, as well as about 191 Technical Committee in Russia. The speaker gave a detailed analysis of the most important international library standards and outlined the state of affairs in Russia for which there was emphasized a strong need for developing national sets of documents. There were presented terms and general agenda of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences the specialists of which were hard at work with the matter, there was also introduced the new national standard " Bibliometric indicators. Terms and definitions, metering structure".
The next participant to speak was Pavel V. Riabov, head of the Centre of Innovative Information Technologies of the M.I. Rudomino Library for Foreign Literature. Mr Riabov wanted to share the experience of development, implementation, updating and usage of "System of management of the resources of public library". Pavel Vladimirovich introduced the technology cycle, pointed out the necessity of quality of statistics harvesting, emphasized the importance of feedback functions. The questions to follow were mainly connected with the problems of data security. Still the general theme was found up-to-the-minute, and not only for the needs of public libraries. The ideas introduced and the experience shared could be successfully applied in the libraries of the establishments of higher education, as well as in libraries of other public and close-circle organizations. Thus Mr Riabov, who had already had a chance to introduce his project for the audiences in Sudak and Suzdal, was invited to the All-Russian Library Congress of the Russian Library Association, which was to take place in Murmansk in June. The overall coverage in mass media and the large number of the attendees of the event would contribute to the sooner spreading of the new technology optimizing working processes of libraries and enhancing quality of reader services.
After a little while, when the break was over, the discussions were resumed, and the next speaker was Yuri V. Chekhovich, candidate of physics and mathematics, executive director of the "Antiplagiat" company. The theme chosen was "ChatGPT as a killer of science or the elusive Joe". It considered the new neural network ChatGPT chat bot and the ill-famed story of the Russian State University for the Humanities student who had confessed that his qualification work was created with usage of the aforementioned chat bot. Mr Chekhovich delineated the technology as it functioned, described its potentials and capabilities. After that the speaker focused on the technologies "Antiplagiat" was preparing to meet those challenges with. First of all, Yuri Viktorovich pointed out that for the moment of speaking it was impossible to substitute work of human brain with that one of artificial intelligence systems. Secondly, Mr Chekhovich emphasized the fact that work of human experts employed in the sphere of plagiarism-testing was the only possible means which could stop degradation of science in Russia and abroad.
At this very point RSL specialists of the Department of Electronic and Information Services Elena N. Ivanova (candidate of social sciences) and Irina V.Sus (associate professor, candidate of technical sciences) joined the discussion. They were the RSL experts directly involved in the process of plagiarism-testing for scientific papers. Ms Ivanova admitted that scientific works created without any chat-bot technologies would often have the same drawbacks as those ones developed by ChatGPT — they would be incorrect in facts and contain false references. Her question on the prospects of the chat bot usage remained unanswered in a way, for there could be no definite prognosis for the following 2 years in the context of the technologies in demand. To a certain degree there could be predicted the attempts to forbid usage of ChatGPT for research-writings. However there existed a hope for the times when text-generators would leave scientists more time for pure research activities while being occupied with formal writing of technical parts.
Pavel D.Veniukov, postgraduate student of the Department of Intellectual Property Rights of Kutafin Moscow State Law University, in his turn spoke on the rights of libraries for free usage of pieces of writing and for digitization of their holdings. Mr Veniukov gave a brief report on the current legal norms covering issues of fair dealing with the originals of texts and with digitization processes. The speaker reminded the EU directive 2019/790 which recommended lessening of control for the rights for texts and data born digital and introduced his hopes for the prospects on the matters described. Another aspect Pavel Dmitrievich touched upon was the case of the so-called "orphan works". All the issues concerned turned out to be of importance and brought forward hot discussions.
The online part of the event was terminated by the speech of associate professor of the Department of International Law of Kutafin Moscow State Law University Elvin S. Teymurov. When trying to determine the role of libraries in realization of the concept of sustainable development, Mr#nbsp;Teymurov emphasized the importance of the priorities to be set properly. Ecology matters so trendy for the spokespersons from the Division for Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and their supporters turned out to have little to do with the sustainable development in its essence. Harmony with nature was not the priority distinguished by average citizens except for the cases when it endangered life on our planet due to wrongly set consumption and production patterns. Among the real goals there had to remain economics and the society. While library activities were to be viewed in the framework of their social agenda. However the problem was that libraries lacked social vectors in the concepts of their development. Upon the speaker's opinion, libraries had to initiate their job for forming culture of sustainable development. Libraries were to provide information, to design databases of quality, to become guides to the world of knowledge, to contribute to the advancement of civilization and knowledge throughout the world. Another goal to be achieved was to teach users deal with information. And in order to attain all those objectives libraries had to know how assert their status correctly. Elvin#nbsp;Sakhavatovich admitted that the problem of library positioning was pressing not only for Russian establishments. Libraries of the USA were in a way silent if social propaganda was considered. In conclusion Mr Teymurov advised the officials of the Russian Library Association to think over how there could be organized and highlighted the events devoted to the realization of the ideas of the concept of sustainable development in library sphere.