Libraries in the AI Era: Robert Hilliker on Access, Privacy, and Scholarly Value

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/03/06

Robert Hilliker, Director of Library Relations (North America) at Springer Nature, he works at the front lines where research access, budgets, licensing, and institutional mission collide. With decades of experience across academic and school libraries—including senior leadership roles—he has focused on how libraries adapt to changing research practices, digital scholarship, and community needs. His perspective is especially relevant right now: libraries are asked to be guardians of access and privacy while also supporting open science, data infrastructure, and AI-era information literacy—often with finite resources and rising costs. 

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Robert Hilliker, Springer Nature’s Director of Library Relations (North America), about how libraries navigate budget pressure, open science, and AI-driven discovery. Hilliker argues publishers often understand constraints, but librarians still need better ways to communicate value to senior leadership. He describes libraries’ shift from collections to research-support services—data management, copyright, training, and open access publishing. Generative AI accelerates “zero-click search,” complicating attribution and impact tracking. He outlines modern access as fragmented and convenience-driven, emphasizes procurement-based privacy protections, and highlights responses to paper mills, including publishing guidance, trusted indexes, and transformative agreements.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do publishers misunderstand about library constraints? 

Robert Hilliker: As a former librarian, actually, I think many librarians would be surprised by how well publishers understand the constraints we operate under—everything from the budget challenges to the high expectations of our users are, in my experience, well known to academic publishers.  Where I think the bigger challenge lies is in how best to help librarians articulate the value of the resources publishers provide to the senior academic leaders who determine library budgets.  There are pockets of progress being made on this issue, in areas like measuring the positive impact of a well-resourced library on student success, but also in accounting for the wider social, health, and economic impacts of promoting broader access to the latest research (more on that below).  Still, it is very much a work in progress. 

Jacobsen: How are library priorities shifting with AI tools and open science expectations? 

Hilliker: Looking back over my career, the shift towards open access publishing—and open science more broadly—has had a massive impact on the role of academic libraries, particularly at institutions with significant research activity.  Many libraries have gone from having a single “scholarly communications librarian” role to an entire team devoted to “research support services” that may encompass everything from research data management support, to copyright and IP consultations, to research training for graduate and undergraduate students, to the publishing of open access journals.  Ultimately, these libraries are in the middle of a long-term transition from a world where we acquired physical information resources for local consultation by students and researchers to one where we provide a comprehensive suite of information services in support of the entire teaching and learning mission of their institutions, which includes disseminating their research to a global audience to ensure the benefits of new discoveries are widely realized. 

It’s early to say whether generative AI will have a similarly long-lasting impact on the direction of libraries, but certainly there are indications that it will.  The biggest change so far is in how people search for information, as the rapid rise of so-called “zero-click search” upends the entire information ecosystem by removing the signals of user intent and interest that libraries and publishers have gotten used to having over the last 25 years or so.  We have a challenge ahead of us making sure that we can continue to properly value original intellectual property and trace its usage and impact. The key for libraries is to stay focused on their values and purpose—helping people find good information and make good use of it—rather than on maintaining processes and procedures that may no longer serve those values. 

Jacobsen: What does access mean now, e.g., interlibrary loan, preprints, subscriptions, etc.? 

Hilliker: I think your question captures the fragmentation of access since the rise of the World Wide Web—the reality is people have so many sources of information these days that it can be overwhelming to consider.  And, in fact, many people are overwhelmed by it!  Happily, most people still believe in libraries as a trusted source of information, but they don’t feel like our modes of access have necessarily kept pace with technological change.  It isn’t enough to provide access; you have to work to make that access relevant to users, to make it convenient for them.  Streamlining interlibrary loan is one way to approach that: most users don’t care where the book or article is coming from as long as they get it quickly.  That might also mean investing in apps and interfaces that make it easier for your users to find, read, annotate, and save digital content.  If you can provide that utility, along with access to high quality information, then users will see how the value of library-provided content exceeds what they can find on their own. 

Jacobsen: How should institutions evaluate value, e.g., usage stats, research competitiveness, etc.? 

Hilliker: I don’t think there’s “one ring to rule them all” here—if anything, I think the desire for a single uniform set of criteria has kept us from having a much-needed in-depth conversation about what creates and delivers value in higher education. Traditional metrics like usage and citations are important, but when we just quote numbers without context we are doing researchers a disservice.  One promising area that my colleagues at Springer Nature have been exploring in partnership with Overton is the policy impact of published research.  They recently issued a report highlighting a number of ways in which researchers can enhance the impact of their work, from ensuring that it is framed in ways that highlight its utility to a non-expert audience to publishing open access, which makes it available to a global audience.  Going forward, I hope we will see these kinds of impacts included in research assessment process at both the institutional and individual level. 

Jacobsen: What are the privacy threats facing libraries? 

Hilliker: Unsurprisingly, the main risks libraries face in protecting the privacy of their users come from the increasingly complex technology environment they operate in.  Traditional concerns like protecting the privacy of a patron’s borrowing history were more easily managed when they were primarily borrowing print books; how do you protect a patron when they are interacting with dozens of online platforms that we neither host nor directly monitor?  In my experience, the libraries that do this best collaborate closely with not only the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) on their campus, but also the General Counsel’s Office and, if they have one, the Chief Privacy Officer or Chief Compliance Officer.  That way they have a shared understanding of the legal and technical aspects of the privacy risks and can work to use the procurement and contracting process to mitigate that risk by ensuring they and their vendor partners follow industry best practices in security and user privacy. 

Jacobsen: How do you see libraries responding to paper mills and predatory journals? 

Hilliker: Many academic libraries have begun providing trainings and consultations to help authors find good venues for their research; some have even added roles like “scholarly publishing librarian” that include this as a core service.  Resources like DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals) and Cabell’s Predatory Journals help librarians determine which journals are reliable and which should be avoided. 

Read and Publish Agreements are another important mechanism here: by underwriting the publishing costs at trusted publishing partners, they ensure their faculty have APC-free access to high-quality Open Access venues for their research.  These agreements, which are also called “Transformative Agreements,” can also simplify compliance with funder mandates for public access to grant-funded research–and they benefit researchers who don’t have large grants, making Open Access publishing more equitable for folks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Jacobsen: What partnerships could reduce friction without compromising principles? 

Hilliker: We need to increase the substantive partnerships between academic libraries and academic publishers.  In my work at Springer Nature, I have found that many of our goals align directly with library goals: we all want to see a healthy, sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem, where researchers can readily share their work with a broad audience, and members of that audience can trust in the quality and integrity of what they are reading.   

There are many shared steps we can take to realize that vision together.  To give a very specific example, I currently serve as Co-Chair of the University Relations Working Group for the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI), a multi-stakeholder partnership funded by academic publishers to raise awareness about cybersecurity risks that can impact library operations and undermine the scholarly communications ecosystem.  Our group consists of publishers working directly with librarians and IT professionals; we convene panel discussions and present posters at conferences, we conduct surveys and other research to stay current on emerging threats and areas of concern, and we prepare information resources to share with stakeholder groups to help them navigate this difficult terrain, like this toolkit for librarians.  There’s a lot of advice in there, but the main takeaway is that organizational silos and lack of communication are the biggest sources of risk—in other words, collaboration isn’t just nice to have, it is critical to realizing and protecting our principles. 

Jacobsen: If you had one policy lever to improve the scholarly ecosystem for students and researchers, what would it be? 

Hilliker: If I could wave that proverbial magic wand, I would see to it that every academic institution had a policy in place to ensure that everyone involved in scholarly research had an institutionally-verified ORCID ID and the training and support to use it well.  I think that would go a surprisingly long way in contributing to greater visibility of scholarship across all fields and greater security within the scholarly ecosystem writ large. 

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rob.

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