Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
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Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#2edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#3edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
With biology at least a lot of your reputation relies on your reputation, and a lot of that comes from publications and the impact factor of the journals you publish in, Nature being the one to aim for. Not sure if its as relevant to AI.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#4edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
That role (in machine learning) is already filled by conference proceedings (plus ArXiV), so this journal is an opportunistic attempt to monetize a niche which doesn't need filling.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#5edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
In some fields, like machine learning, many researchers put their work onto arxiv. There is like 50 papers a day now. https://arxiv.org/list/stat.ML/recent
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#6edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
I work with a fair amount of people from academia, a lot of them seem to have the view that things that have not been peer reviewed are not worth reading.
But ML already has conferences and journals where work is peer reviewed and published in an open access manner.
So it's not that academics see journals/conferences as value-less, but that they are already doing all this work for free, why do it for free for Springer who will then charge everyone?
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#7If people can post a pre-print to Arxiv then why is it a big deal if it also gets published in Nature Machine Intelligence? Sure a better formatted and edited version may be behind a paywall but anyone can find the original arxiv paper and get the important points.
edit: To make it clear, I'm talking about submitting to BOTH Arxiv, where it's freely available, AND a paywalled journal like Nature.
edit 2: I get that we don't want to waste, often government, money on mere distribution of research, but I also think researchers need a way to distinguish their work from the thousands of arxiv papers that get posted every year. Whether that's through a Nature publication or something else is immaterial.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#8edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
With biology at least a lot of your reputation relies on your reputation, and a lot of that comes from publications and the impact factor of the journals you publish in, Nature being the one to aim for. Not sure if its as relevant to AI.
The old model may be obsolete, or at least need tuning. What about offering a "vetting grade"? Anybody can submit (assuming minimum standards) and anyone can read, but you'd have to pay to have your research vetted, perhaps with different levels of vetting. Don't make it all-or-nothing.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#9If people can post a pre-print to Arxiv then why is it a big deal if it also gets published in Nature Machine Intelligence? Sure a better formatted and edited version may be behind a paywall but anyone can find the original arxiv paper and get the important points. edit: To make it clear, I'm talking about submitting to BOTH Arxiv, where it's freely available, AND a paywalled journal like Nature. edit 2: I get that w…
Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society. If "publishing in Nature" is no longer a credential for academics, then Nature can't charge universities big bucks... that money can be spent by institutions on other things (like funding GPU's to do more actual machine learning research)... so boycotting the journal is strictly a good thing.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#10edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.
I work with a fair amount of people from academia, a lot of them seem to have the view that things that have not been peer reviewed are not worth reading. But ML already has conferences and journals where work is peer reviewed and published in an open access manner. So it's not that academics see journals/conferences as value-less, but that they are already doing all this work for free, why do it for free for Springe…
I think a lot non-academics (myself included) tend to hear the phrase "peer reviewed" and conflate it (rightly or wrongly) with "these results are replicable and therefore correct."
I don't know what the long term solution is but I have a feeling it won't involve companies that charge a lot of money for a service (publishing) that has been effectively free since the Internet has existed.