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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

#71

Post by gowld »

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…

The academy is a primary example status quo and gatekeeping. Any change to the system is risky to them.

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

#72

Post by Barrin92 »

baxtr wrote: post #58
pedrocr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this has nothing to do with some mystical 'nature of humans', we're just stuck in a bad nash equilibrium.

Journals thrive on reputation and nobody can individually dissent because they lose out. This is the same mechanism that keeps overpriced tuition fees at ivy league colleges afloat.

The answer is to collectively get out by legislating the practice or offering a free public alternative that everybody can immediately jump too. Given that the efforts become more and more organised, (German wholesale boycott of Elsevier) this might be happening sooner than later.

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

#74

Post by adventured »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #64
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…

Are you claiming that most research is already freely available and yet everyone is, for some unspecified reason, still paying publishers for an extraneous service? The NIH site links right to PubMed Central from which it seems like it'd be 'easy' to find a paper for which I know the title. None of the pages on the NSF site ever seemed to be intended for someone that's not contributing to the 'public access repositor…

The parent very clearly was not saying that most research is already freely available. You're incorrectly claiming that. The parent said in most cases regarding US taxpayer funded research, right here:

> in most cases I know of (NSF and NIH funded research) US taxpayer funded research must be made freely available

Besides that, you'd be surprised that people and organizations spend money on things they don't actually need to? In my experience that happens constantly in both business and government.

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

#75

Post by a-dub »

Honestly, they should just flip the journal funding model on its head. Instead of readers paying for subscriptions, publishing institutions can pay for publication rights. In fact, they could probably take all the subscription money they get from institutions and change nothing but the name (something like "authorship fee", "membership fee" or "institutional publication service fee" or whatever). make the journals open access and not feel any change at all in revenue.

Besides, if you look at the money, fancy journals are responsible for a lot of funding that ends up in the coffers of researchers or the institutions that support them, so it really wouldn't be crazy. I read somewhere that a Science/Nature paper in some fields is thought to be worth >$1mm in funding.

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

#76

Post by robotresearcher »

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.

Deep learning, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio & Geoffrey Hinton, Nature volume 521, pages 436–444 (28 May 2015)

Strategy: publish in the high-impact established Nature-family journal, but publicly boycott the no-impact new Nature-family journal. Win-win.

edit: added -family suffix to clarify that I completely understand these are two different journals from the same publisher.

edit 2: I now understand why the editor of the new journal was hitting senior people up for personal meetings at ICRA last week. He didn't want to hear about our work: he wanted hints to help him on positioning.

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

#77

Post by Jach »

lccarrasco wrote: post #46
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.

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.

The criticism is along the lines of "Yeah basically all fields are academic descendants of Gauss. Euler too." The article's aside is just odd, as is in the first place bringing up Gauss (linking to another Guardian article, maybe the real intent?) and an astronomer both paying another dude (some amount) what sounds like club member fees for letter redistribution.

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

#78

Post by gowld »

akvadrako wrote: post #34
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.

That doesn't solve the problem of getting open access to IEEE published papers.

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

#79

Post by gowld »

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.

It's just a literary segue from their oldest known closed-access publication to the modern day.

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

#80

Post by backpropaganda »

robotresearcher wrote: post #76
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.

Deep learning, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio & Geoffrey Hinton, Nature volume 521, pages 436–444 (28 May 2015) Strategy: publish in the high-impact established Nature-family journal, but publicly boycott the no-impact new Nature-family journal. Win-win. edit: added -family suffix to clarify that I completely understand these are two different journals from the same publisher. edit 2: I now understand why the editor of th…

They're boycotting the new Nature Machine Intelligence journal, not the old Nature journal. It's possible to be against a policy while still taking advantage of the policy for game theoretic reasons.
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