CCC has long been committed to taking a collaborative approach when working with our partners. As part of our commitment, in April we brought together representatives from 17 of our software customers, a group comprising some of the most innovative life sciences companies in the world, for the 2024 RightFind Suite Innovation Summit.
This highly interactive in-person event in Boston, MA, took place over two days and promoted sharing across attendees and CCC subject matter experts on multiple topics, such as current thinking and feedback on the future of information management practices, the role of AI, and how CCC can continue to support their future state with improved products and services across the RightFind Suite. Below are some of the top things we learned when reflecting on the event:
The need for AI rights
The promise of AI has never been so tangible as when ChatGPT was released to the public. Since that moment over a year and a half ago, companies have been grappling with how Generative AI and LLMs can realize efficiencies within their organization to innovate more quickly. For life sciences companies, this means bringing potentially life-saving drugs and products to market faster.
There was broad information sharing and discussion by clients during the summit on how to leverage AI within information management workflows across the product development pipeline. This conversation revealed a wide spectrum of approaches to AI policies represented by our attendees:
- Some companies have begun implementing LLMs driven by R&D, IT, and data science teams while others have policies that currently prohibit any use of AI due to privacy and copyright concerns.
- Some organizations are building AI tools on-premises behind firewalls, trained only on internally produced content.
- Several companies are evaluating the promise of workflow efficiencies by participating in beta trials from 3rd party software leveraging generative AI.
- Across the board, organizations are working through issues of how to incorporate or prevent full text published content from being used to train or refine LLMs.
The most important topic to our information manager attendees by far was respecting copyright for published content in AI projects. We shared our plans for including internal AI rights in our CCC copyright license, which was timely news for our clients as they work with internal stakeholders on their AI policies around the use of copyrighted content and data.
Additionally, the optimization of AI workflows through the access of AI rights was a top request of summit attendees. We shared our software plans, using a responsible approach to bringing generative AI capabilities into our products while respecting copyright and minimizing the risks of hallucinations.
AI is offering an opportunity for information professionals to promote their skill sets
Since the introduction of generative AI, there has been a semi-panic across many industries with common headlines indicating that AI is going to automate everyone’s jobs. At our event, it was heartening to hear that many information managers are not feeling threatened by AI, but instead are capitalizing on it to build awareness of the services provided by the library team.
Many of our customers are finding ways to elevate the expertise of the information organization and demonstrating that information scientists have valuable expertise to offer when it comes to AI, copyright, and the deployment of technology across the organization. We also heard from clients who were invited to participate in cross-functional groups to evaluate AI project proposals. Information managers offer particularly valuable expertise when it comes to copyright and to asking insightful questions about the underlying data and information that is being leveraged in the technology.
One customer at the summit relayed that hallucinations created by LLMs helped raise awareness of their company’s library team. When an LLM was sending researchers on wild goose chases to track down fake references, R&D leadership at their company became concerned and boosted promotion of its library team to help employees find authoritative information.
We’ve always known that information professionals have incredibly valuable skills when it comes to evaluating software and the accuracy of information being provided — AI is giving library teams a chance to socialize this knowledge across their company.
Understanding the needs of researchers is vital, and CCC can help
This year, the summit was primarily comprised of information professionals, but we were very lucky to have a few folks representing groups like clinical, as well. These users brought an insightful perspective that represented both their companies at large and their own teams. Many of the information professionals in the room found the perspective of the clinical group incredibly valuable in understanding their workflows and information needs. There was general buzz at the event about the need for information managers to get closer to the different teams they serve, including R&D, data science, medical affairs, and clinical.
As information professionals ourselves, we know how much it’s stressed in library school that you must understand your users and their needs to provide them with the right content and tools. This understanding is critical to us as we develop products at CCC. In a time of shrinking budgets, when it’s becoming more common to hear that a very small team of information professionals are supporting thousands of researchers, it can be a challenge to spend enough time with users to really dig into and understand their information needs and how information management software can support their workflows.
In the room together, we discovered there is a role CCC can play to help further everyone’s understanding of the information needs of users. While CCC helped with facilitating focus groups for individual customers in the past, the group at this year’s Innovation Summit expressed strong interest in CCC facilitating more sessions, either virtually or in person, to gather feedback and thoughts across companies from targeted teams like medical affairs and R&D. To this end, we already have plans in the works to bring more end users together to help our information professionals gain deeper insight into researcher needs and to help shape CCC product offerings in the future.
RightFind Enterprise has long played a vital role in helping enable copyright compliant collaboration amongst researchers. Unlike other reference management tools on the market, RightFind shared and personal libraries make it easy to store, organize, and collaborate on citations within teams across the enterprise, while also providing easy access to full text and promoting compliance with rights awareness built into researcher workflows. Combined with RightFind Cite It, a cite-while-you-write tool for authoring, shared libraries simplify reference and citation management with an intuitive user experience while seamlessly checking the rights you have to share copyrighted content.
Clients at the Innovation Summit were excited to brainstorm how to enhance library workflows to promote library usage across their organizations. AI was seen as a way to simplify processes and promote efficiencies when using libraries for reference management by automating tagging and classification of content, creating and populating libraries, and summarizing full text articles and groups of articles. In addition, simply meeting the user where they are so they can find libraries within their current workflows was seen as vital for adoption and engagement from users. Finally, expanding metadata fields in libraries to support complex authoring use cases in Cite It can help customers reach even more functional areas across their organizations.