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Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

theguardian.com

41–50 of 235 posts

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

#41

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.

Deepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.

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

#43
> In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of Gauss’s pioneering work, [...].

Yes, and I'm a descendand of Julius Caesar, Confucius and Charlemagne. I won't tell you this when introducing myself though, because so is everybody else.

It wouldn't have occured to me that AI researchers have such inferiority complexes that they need to descend to such name-dropping, but I guess I was wrong.

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

#44

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…

> the arrangement has become more and more one sided favoring the publishers

Rather than "has become" this is publishers using their leverage to achieve this situation.

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

#45
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of them seem to have the view that things that have not been peer reviewed are not worth reading Can't we have some kind of PageRank system, not necessarily based only on citations, to solve that?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.

Yes, but I suppose you can also use it for upvotes instead of direct citations.

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

#46
post #43

> In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of Gauss’s pioneering work, [...]. Yes, and I'm a descendand of Julius Caesar, Confucius and Charlemagne. I won't tell you this when introducing myself though, because so is everybody else. It wouldn't have occured to me that AI researchers have such inferiority complexes that they need to descend to such name-dropping, but I guess I was wrong.

I think he means that the field of ML has been built in part from Gauss's work on algebra and statistics, not that the author is related to Gauss himself.

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

#47
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

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

#48

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 "tax…

Mostly papers are thrown up on arxiv. I don't see why we should have to pay to host our own papers when we could just host our own papers. Seriously, three grand? How many months of AWS S3 does that pay for?

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

#49
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Whether peer review is blinded depends on the field. Some of the major ML conferences like NIPS are blinded, but in general most journals are not. The reviewers see the authors and affiliations and the editors see everything.

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

#50
post #29

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

They already are organizing conferences, which for some fields is a major way of sharing research so it wouldn’t be a problem.
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