2025: Oxford-Style Debate: AI Is Fair Use

Although every year in the scholarly publishing ecosystem is a balancing act of innovation, optimization, and value creation, 2025 is shaping up to be particularly challenging as the pace and scale of change is accelerating more than we’ve ever seen before. There is increasing pressure to provide value to and to meet the incredibly diverse needs of the global research community while maintaining financial health for our own organizations, living our values, and continuing to protect the scholarly record. With AI, open access, integrity, and mistrust frequently dominating the conversation, we are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in both our industry and society as a whole. As always, the SSP community continues to focus on bringing together academics, funders, librarians, publishers, service providers, technologists, researchers and countless others with a communal interest and stake in disseminating scholarly information. We look to the 47th Annual Meeting as an opportunity to continue this tradition and welcome all colleagues and community stakeholders.

Etzer Botes is Sr. Director, Strategy at Wiley, leading strategic AI-powered growth in Academic and Trade publishing. He works cross-functionally with strategy, tech, product, and editorial teams developing AI-based tools to assist authors, editors, and creators develop quality novel and derivative content. He and his teammates are laser focused on collaborating with end users to design AI tools that augment human creativity in pursuit of increased publishing productivity. Prior to joining Wiley, he led strategic growth efforts at Kaplan North America, notably supporting Kaplan’s leadership to establish, operationalize, and expand its Higher Ed academic and technology services partnerships business. Before that, he led business modernization, financial improvement, and restructuring projects for clients in Higher Ed, Public Sector, Financial Services, and other industries as a Deloitte strategy consultant.