Project Alexandria: Towards Freeing Scientific Knowledge from Copyright Burdens via LLMs

TL;DR

This paper introduces Knowledge Units, a novel representation for scientific texts using LLMs, which preserves factual content and is legally defensible, enabling broader access and reuse of scientific knowledge.

Contribution

It proposes a new method to convert scholarly documents into style-agnostic, knowledge-preserving units, supported by legal analysis and empirical evidence of factual retention.

Findings

Knowledge Units are legally defensible under German and U.S. law.

They preserve approximately 95% of factual knowledge.

Open-source tools for conversion are provided.

Abstract

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We propose a new idea for the community to adopt: convert scholarly documents into knowledge preserving, but style agnostic representations we term Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95\%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.