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Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

theguardian.com

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

#31

Post by icc97 »

mooneater wrote: post #17

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.

Not that I'm for journals, but those heavy hitters typically have their own brand in that of Google or Microsoft etc. Without an external 'brand' of Nature the importance of working for the recognised companies when submitting your research papers goes up.

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

#33

Post by tokipin »

Journal reviewing is oversold in my opinion. Just like Wikipedia became a better encyclopedia than traditional encyclopedias, I don't see why open-access approaches can't be at least as efficient at truth-seeking and consesus-building than traditional journals.

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

#34

Post by akvadrako »

sytelus wrote: post #32

While we are on the topic, why are we supporting IEEE? They have so many valuable as well as historical papers behind their paywall. I'm IEEE member and want to find out what can I do about this.

Why are you an IEEE member? Can't you just be not.

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

#35

Post by alexschiller »

danmg wrote: post #27

Legality 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'.

The American Psychological Association tried and they quickly backtracked after blowback: https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670...

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

#36

Post by c3534l »

tokipin wrote: post #33

Journal reviewing is oversold in my opinion. Just like Wikipedia became a better encyclopedia than traditional encyclopedias, I don't see why open-access approaches can't be at least as efficient at truth-seeking and consesus-building than traditional journals.

The whole idea behind journals is peer-review. That's very nearly a wikipedia-style open access system anyway. There's just not a great reason to keep chargind exhorbitant publishing fees when it's published online.

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

#37

Post by dboreham »

sytelus wrote: post #32

While we are on the topic, why are we supporting IEEE? They have so many valuable as well as historical papers behind their paywall. I'm IEEE member and want to find out what can I do about this.

Hmm...hadn't thought about this but...same and same.

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

#38

Post by stilley2 »

Everytime something like this comes up I feel compelled to remind everyone that in most cases I know of (NSF and NIH funded research) US taxpayer funded research must be made freely available. See https://publicaccess.nih.gov/ and https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/des... .

Don't get me wrong, I think the current publishing model is archiac, exploitative, and needs to change, but this whole "taxpayer funded research should be freely available argument" seems to me to oversimplify the issue and ignore the facts.

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

#39

Post by logicallee »

mooneater wrote: post #17

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.

People are forgetting what year we're living in, 1818.

It is not possible to publish something without setting moveable type made of lead. it would be different if there were an Internet or something but that's way in the future.

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

#40

Post by apetresc »

yread wrote: post #29
skywhopper wrote: post #25

Admittedly 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

Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?
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