Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal • Hacker News Board

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#11

Post by mooneater » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

stanfordkid wrote: post #9

outlace wrote: post #7

If 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.

Hopefully all that money does not have to go into GPUs!

Universities in less rich countries would be on a more level playing field, if these massive subscriptions were not table stakes.

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#12

Post by auntienomen » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #2

edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.

People don't find out about research by reading journals. They go to lectures and read mailing lists for that. Journal articles are typically a year too late.

The value-add from journals is that they (at least theoretically) guarantee another person has read the paper carefully and believes it is correct.

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#13

Post by letitgo12345 » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

outlace wrote: post #7

If 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…

Nature as a journal also tends to reward hype and exaggeration over concrete results.

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#14

Post by ClassAndBurn » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

Journals are based on prestige; researchers give their work for free to a publisher where it is reviewed by other researchers (usually for free) and then published such that other researchers must pay to get the work. It does create a well respected system since publishers want only quality work but the arrangement has become more and more one sided favoring the publishers.

TL;DR This isn't that surprising. The cost of publishing is lower than ever and researchers are tired of getting charged for what they give away for free.

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#15

Post by sgt101 » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

outlace wrote: post #7

If 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…

If you have two papers in NIPS every year then yes, your tenure at a big school or .com is assured and all is well. But that is less than the top 0.1% of active ml researchers, and also the most fashionable 0.1% as well. For the rest the impact factor is important in order to get another gig!

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#16

Post by robkop » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

mediocrejoker wrote: post #10

Eridrus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of peer reviews in ML are currently completely open. For instance you can view the reviews for papers in previous and upcoming conferences here [0].

Also in terms of replicability ML is in a unique position where a lot of research is on standard datasets with models that don't take an excessive amount of compute power to train. This means that if the authors include a github link to their code you can fully replicate their results. So some "peer reviewed" ML papers can actually subscribe to your first description of peer reviewed.

[0]: https://openreview.net/

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#17

Post by mooneater » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

Some heavy hitters on the signatory list: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Volodymyr Mnih, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine.

Would like to see Demis Hassabis and David Silver join the effort.

If Deepmind, OpenAI and Berkeley (well represented here) all boycott, that's a huge chunk of key AI researchers.

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#18

Post by projectramo » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

outlace wrote: post #7

If 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…

This is a great question, and one that I also have.

I think the responders (so far) are missing the crucial point that you suggest publishing in both arxiv and the journal of choice.

So the journal of choice, behind a paywall, gives you the prestige and tenure.

Meanwhile, arxiv hands the information over to other academics.

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#19

Post by amelius » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

Eridrus wrote: post #6

jbob2000 wrote: post #2

edit: 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…

> a lot of them seem to have the view that things that have not been peer reviewed are not worth reading

Can't we have some kind of PageRank system, not necessarily based only on citations, to solve that?

Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

#20

Post by SiempreViernes » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:49 PM UTC

letitgo12345 wrote: post #13

outlace wrote: post #7

If 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…

Nature as a journal also tends to reward hype and exaggeration over concrete results.

Yeah, but think about all the trash they must reject if they let the questionable things trough.

I’m also more sceptic that the flagship journals actually have declined, at least in part I suspect the critsism is just complains in the spirit of those about ”the youth of today”.