Generative Artificial Intelligence and Web-Scale Discovery

The NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Standing Committee most recently updated its Recommended Practice, “Promoting Transparency in Discovery,” in 2020, several years before large-scale Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools emerged into the public’s view in late 2023. Much as web-scale discovery changed the library discovery environment around 2010, Generative AI has the potential to be similarly revolutionary, affecting the way library users do their research and content providers share their full-text and indexing. 

To better understand the specific areas of interest and concern among participants in the discovery ecosystem, ODI conducted a survey of our constituents from September to October 2024, following several months of planning. The findings from that survey are included in this report, along with specific areas of work that ODI will be taking on in the months to come. ODI seeks to enhance mechanisms for transparency in the use of Generative AI among content providers (publishers and traditional abstracting and indexing services), discovery providers (companies that collect and index content from multiple content providers), and libraries (who license both the discovery service and content being indexed).