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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

#51

Post by alexbeloi »

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…

>What am I missing about the benefits of the status quo keep it so entrenched?

The entrenchment is due to perceived (and cultivated) prestige, less so about tangible benefits. Prestigious journals have good brand value, they spend money cultivating it and they extract earnings from it.

Researchers and administrators trade on journal brand value for career advancements. They benefit from a highly prestige-stratified journal catalog as a tool for differentiating themselves from their peers, it's much easier to justify a promotion based on 'X publications to prestigious journal A, B, C' than 'bunch of people in the community think this is a great result', especially to a non-expert.

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

#53

Post by baxtr »

Former scientist here, too. People tend to forget what value a Nature article carries for the successful career in academia. The technical “hosting” of Nature and Arxiv might be the same, but the first will buy a lot of fame and potentially a good position at an research institute.

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

#54

Post by lactau »

mbid wrote: 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.

A small nitpick. Nobody alive is a descendant of Julius Caesar.

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

#55

Post by pedrocr »

baxtr wrote: post #53

Former scientist here, too. People tend to forget what value a Nature article carries for the successful career in academia. The technical “hosting” of Nature and Arxiv might be the same, but the first will buy a lot of fame and potentially a good position at an research institute.

No one forgets that. Everyone just thinks we should solve the chicken-and-egg problem and move that prestige to a set of journals that don't gouge everyone for research that was mostly paid for by public money already and was peer-reviewed by public employees volunteering.

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

#56

Post by quizme2000 »

A bit off topic but have research journals become a whipping boy for the anti-science crowd? The general public is being spoon fed either very poor quality click-bait "break through/cure cancer" articles or worse. Recently the peer-reviewed != reproducible issue was highlighted. I feel there is a common thread but it could my commonality bias of an HN reader. Is attacking science journals a new trend?

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

#57

Post by mooneater »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #41
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.

Deepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.

they are not mutually exclusive. nature allows for preprints on arxiv according to wikipedia.

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

#58

Post by baxtr »

pedrocr wrote: post #55
baxtr wrote: post #53

Former scientist here, too. People tend to forget what value a Nature article carries for the successful career in academia. The technical “hosting” of Nature and Arxiv might be the same, but the first will buy a lot of fame and potentially a good position at an research institute.

No one forgets that. Everyone just thinks we should solve the chicken-and-egg problem and move that prestige to a set of journals that don't gouge everyone for research that was mostly paid for by public money already and was peer-reviewed by public employees volunteering.

Well, then you have to come up with a good idea how to change the nature of humans. We thrive on fame as social status currency

Not just in science. The equivalent in startups might be a famous VC or whatever. It’s about attaching yourself to a brand.

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

#59

Post by mooneater »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #41
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.

Deepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.

also deepmind published in nature justthis month.

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

#60

Post by stilley2 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #48
stilley2 wrote: post #38

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?

In my experience those high fees usually only apply when publishing open access. In our lab we publish using the free closed access method, and then a free version goes on PubMed (potentially after an embargo). So the research is available for free, the lab still gets the journal prestige, and it doesn't cost the lab anything. This is by no means a perfect system, but it's not as dire as a lot of these articles want us to think.
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