On Tuesday, Oxford University Press announced it is running a three-month pilot that lets students and researchers at Harvard Library, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Oxford search licensed content from OUP inside ChatGPT Edu, the version of OpenAI’s chatbot sold to universities.
The test began in October and runs through December. Selected users at the three schools can ask ChatGPT Edu questions and get answers drawn from the OUP books and journals their institution already buys or subscribes to. The answers include citations and links to the full text on Oxford Academic, OUP’s online publishing platform.
Behind the scenes is a Model Context Protocol, or MCP, server that OUP built with Silverchair, the company that hosts its online content. MCP is an open technical standard that lets AI assistants connect to outside databases. When a user asks a question, OUP’s server searches the press’s content, picks the most relevant sources, and passes them to ChatGPT to use in its answer.
According to OUP, its own survey found that researchers are using AI more often in their work, but still distrust it. The press also pointed to the growth of “zero-click” searches, where people get an answer from a search engine or chatbot without ever clicking through to the original source.
Rather than launching a product, OUP is using the pilot to gather evidence. “We’ve undertaken this pilot to learn what real-world use of publisher MCPs looks like and what benefits it drives,” said Tanya Laplante, director of product platforms for OUP’s academic division.
The press and the three institutions will track usage and collect feedback from faculty and students. They want to learn whether citations from a known publisher motivate researchers to click through to publisher sources and whether access to OUP’s information improves the answers delivered by ChatGPT.
Richard Ovenden, the head librarian at the University of Oxford, said the collaboration will help the libraries “develop approaches to ensure that students and researchers can confidently rely on the information they discover.”
OUP’s announcement came on the same day that Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Princeton University Press announced Meridian, a shared MCP service run by the AI licensing startup Cashmere.
The two projects are implementing different strategies to achieve similar results: OUP built its own connection to a single AI platform and is testing it at three schools, while Meridian is meant to give many presses one connection to many AI tools.
