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Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
21–30 of 235 posts
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#22Some 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.
Also Ian Goodfellow (GANs) and John Langford (Vowpal Wabbit).
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#23edit: 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I work with a fair amount of people from academia, a lot of them seem to have the view that things that have not been peer reviewed are not worth reading.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…
That's unfortunate because that is how consensus and dogmatic group-think emerge. People need to think for themselves.
I love learning but stayed away from college because I couldn't stand how fundamentally at odds traditional education routes are to creativity and free thinking.
Personally, I find Twitter and arxiv-sanity good sources for keeping up with ML. They have their own mechanism of surfacing popular content and filtering based on preferences.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#24edit: 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I work with a fair amount of people from academia, a lot of them seem to have the view that things that have not been peer reviewed are not worth reading.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…
The greatest value of journals isn't that three random people (give or take) have reviewed and suggested edits to the papers before publication.
The greatest value of journals is when hundreds or thousands (or, hell, dozens) of other people, well informed and competent in the subject matter, read the papers and consider how it meshes with their own experience and understanding and build upon it, writing letters to the journal pointing out problems and articles which follow up on the original work.
That is how an idea is validated. An article published in a journal that no one reads isn't much different than an unpublished article, and if work is spread, responded to, and built upon outside of journals, it isn't much different from a journal-published article.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#25Admittedly I work outside academia (though my wife is a tenured professor) and thus have some unavoidable naïveté about how the culture and community work, but I’m always confused about why universities aren’t just sponsoring the organizational costs of coordinating the review process, and establishing community-driven open journals to replace the rent-seeking corporate journals. What am I missing about the benefits of the status quo keep it so entrenched?
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#26If 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.
> Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society
Journals do provide some value. Editing, printing, and herding academics through the camera-ready process all require non-trivial effort.
I would have absolutely no problem with a handful of universities/non-profits/even for-profits devoting some staff to the curation/archival process. And also no problem with those organizations charging others modest fees to fund that work.
The problem with journals is that they capture a lot more value than they provide, that value is not distributed back to the people doing the actual work, and the prestige signal/branding provides a strong moat.
I REALLY think this is an important point. If we continue to behave like all of this stuff is trivial and obvious to replicate, then we'll be forever stuck with predatory journals like Nature.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#27Legality aside, has there ever been an instance of a researcher getting a DMCA notice for posting a paper they wrote on their own website?
Even if you got a DMCA, couldn't you just direct link to a scihub search result that contains your paper?
Edit: I love it when I find my work on scihub. It means it was good enough to 'steal'.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#28Earlier 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…
> 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?
Pagerank is a kind of citations system.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#29Admittedly I work outside academia (though my wife is a tenured professor) and thus have some unavoidable naïveté about how the culture and community work, but I’m always confused about why universities aren’t just sponsoring the organizational costs of coordinating the review process, and establishing community-driven open journals to replace the rent-seeking corporate journals. What am I missing about the benefits…
Universities could be in conflict of interest - organizing review of competing (or worse its own) research
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#30Good. Science publishing is a ridiculous racket.