AI has driven important advances in biomedical research for some time, spurring drug discovery, improving medical imaging, and facilitating engagements with large datasets in emerging fields like precision medicine. However, recent advances, notably the advent of consumer-friendly generative AI tools, have increased the likelihood that AI-informed research and scholarly communication will be ubiquitous in the near future.

Managing this transformation in ways that ensure high-quality, reproducible results and ethical, inclusive research practices is important across academic disciplines, but identifying current practices and supporting the ethical use of these powerful tools is especially important in the biomedical sciences because of their intimate and direct relationship to human health. To encourage the development of ethical research norms and practices governing the use of generative AI across the biomedical sciences, we first need to understand how these researchers use and perceive AI today, as well as the barriers they face in incorporating the technology into their research.

To this end, Ithaka S+R is excited to announce that we are collaborating with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Open Science Program to study how academic biomedical researchers are adopting generative AI into their research practices. The centerpiece of this work is an international survey that will provide landscape-level benchmarking data crucial to inform decision making by institutions, scholarly societies and funders, including CZI.

What’s next?

Ithaka S+R will launch our survey in late February using a mixture of direct and open invitations to participate. We are encouraging scholarly societies, university departments, independent research institutes, private sector organizations, and other stakeholders to share the survey link once it is available with their communities to ensure a broad and representative response from all corners of this diverse domain. Our findings will be shared with CZI and stakeholder communities later this year.

For more information about the project or to request an open link to the survey, please contact Dylan Ruediger (dylan.ruediger@ithaka.org).