Authors Alliance Joins with HathiTrust and Northeastern University on “Transparent Books”

A five-year, $5 million grant to HathiTrust will create responsible, equitable, and transparent services that leverage AI for the public good and scholarly discovery. Authors Alliance and Northeastern University Library are partners in the effort.

HathiTrust has been awarded a five-year, $5 million grant for Transparent Books: AI Infrastructure for Discovery and the Public Interest from the Mellon Foundation. Authors Alliance is a partner in the project alongside Northeastern University Library. 

For us, this grant continues work we began with the Public Interest Corpus: opening a path for research libraries to lawfully make the books in their collections usable for computational research and discovery on terms that support the goals of research, scholarship and access to knowledge, rather than on terms that benefit commercial intermediaries and technology companies. 

The Public Interest Corpus, which Authors Alliance co-led with Northeastern and carried out with Mellon Foundation support in 2024 and 2025, was a planning project that asked how libraries can make the books they have collected and preserved lawfully available for computational research in ways that serve authors, scholars, and the reading public, instead of leaving book-based AI development to a small number of companies working from datasets of uncertain and contested provenance. Through workshops in Boston, New York, and Oakland, dozens of interviews, and the guidance of an advisory board of librarians, researchers, authors, and technologists, the project produced a framework for a library-stewarded, noncommercial books corpus. The report and supporting materials are available at publicinterestcorpus.org.

This next phase puts the lessons from The Public Interest Corpus into practice, using HathiTrust’s collection of more than 19 million digitized volumes as its foundation. HathiTrust will serve as the central partner and steward of the corpus. Northeastern will develop the tools and infrastructure for search, discovery, and text and data mining. Authors Alliance will lead the project’s policy and convening work.

Authors Alliance’s core mission is to support authors who write to be read, and who want their books to contribute to research and learning rather than sit unused. Our role in Transparent Books is to help articulate the legal and normative principles for use of the corpus that will do just that, informed by convening the authors, researchers, and institutions the project aims to serve. Through this project, we want to lower barriers for noncommercial, academic AI researchers so they can build models and tools that serve the goal of advancing research and benefiting the public. We seek to do so in a way that prioritizes the interests of authors in seeing their works and their ideas discovered, attributed, and built upon. 

Over the five years of the grant, the partners will:

• Enhance Book Discovery: Apply AI tools to the HathiTrust corpus to improve descriptive metadata (e.g., subjects, languages, summaries) and text quality, and to develop interactive search to facilitate deeper understanding of books, both as individual items and in aggregate.
• Provide Verified Resources: Offer legitimate, verified, and transparent sources of text and images from books at scale for academic and noncommercial use cases, for purposes such as text mining, computational analysis, and the creation of specialized language models.
• Advance Shared Principles: Develop principles for legal frameworks, research integrity, accountability, and environmental impact to serve as a shared foundation for decision-making that centers academic values and the public good. 
• Create Sustainable Services: Develop financially sustainable services that support academic and noncommercial research. 

Transparent Books will help ensure that the tools shaping how people read and research in the coming years are built on a foundation of values of authors who want to serve the public with their work. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its continued support, and to our partners at HathiTrust and Northeastern University. We will share more as the work develops, and we welcome authors and institutions who want to take part. For more information, see this announcement from HathiTrust.