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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

#81

Post by gowld »

collyw wrote: post #3
jbob2000 wrote: post #2

edit: people don't like discussing things, just want to see their own viewpoints reinforced.

With biology at least a lot of your reputation relies on your reputation, and a lot of that comes from publications and the impact factor of the journals you publish in, Nature being the one to aim for. Not sure if its as relevant to AI.

Computer science doesn't need journals because (1) It's generally easy enough to reproduce any work you care about, so you don't need to take anyone's word for its correctness, and (2) researches can make a fortune in industry doing their (profoitable) work or something related, so the don't need to suck up prestige factories in order to get funding.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by robotresearcher »

backpropaganda wrote: post #80
robotresearcher wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what 'win-win' means.

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

#84

Post by gowld »

stilley2 wrote: post #69
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I picked an article that's about a year old in case there was an embargo before the free one could be made available. Paywalled nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22040 Free version: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5712493/

"embargo" is a bit of a weasel word -- a few weeks embargo, maybe OK. 6-months embargo paralyzes progress.

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

#85

Post by Fins »

mraison wrote: post #61
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.

Also many folks from Facebook AI Research (including Yann LeCun)

Not to say that they are wrong in boycotting, but I find it hard to take seriously a moral stance from somebody working for Facebook.

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

#86

Post by aeorgnoieang »

gowld wrote: post #68
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you give an example of a publicly-funded paper that you couldn't find on PubMed or another server, but a Nature or another closed journal offers for sale?

No. I usually assume that a paywalled article is just not (legitimately) available for free. But for the last paper I did want to read, I was able to find a free version.

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

#87

Post by gowld »

a-dub wrote: post #75

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 op…

You just invented the open access publishing model.

https://www.plos.org/publication-fees

It seems less profitable than the closed-access regime, since copyright is an economically powerful tool.

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

#88

Post by Eridrus »

robkop wrote: post #16
mediocrejoker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot non-academics (myself included) tend to hear the phrase "peer reviewed" and conflate it (rightly or wrongly) with "these results are replicable and therefore correct." I don't know what the long term solution is but I have a feeling it won't involve companies that charge a lot of money for a service (publishing) that has been effectively free since the Internet has existed.

A lot of peer reviews in ML are currently completely open. For instance you can view the reviews for papers in previous and upcoming conferences here [0]. Also in terms of replicability ML is in a unique position where a lot of research is on standard datasets with models that don't take an excessive amount of compute power to train. This means that if the authors include a github link to their code you can fully rep…

I think a lot of ML research, despite being replicable is not necessary useful, because what we really want, approaches we can add in addition to all the other methods we have, that introduce meaningful improvements without unnecessary complexity and work across datasets, are quite rare. And that's assuming the evaluation was done well.

Not to say the research is worthless, just that straight replicability is not necessarily enough.

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

#89

Post by quizme2000 »

whatshisface wrote: post #70
quizme2000 wrote: post #56

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?

Supporting reproduction, complaining about public presentation of science, and disliking the rent-seeking behaviors of journals are all pro-science positions held more often by scientists than any other group.

Thank-you! I haven't talked to a research scientist in quite awhile. Its one of the reasons I like HN's discussion about these types of issues.

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

#90

Post by cjlars »

gowld wrote: post #68
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you give an example of a publicly-funded paper that you couldn't find on PubMed or another server, but a Nature or another closed journal offers for sale?

I don't have the time to dig up an example, but it is a fairly common problem to run into. I went through the exercise of reviewing everything I could find related to a relatively specific business problem (marketing attribution) a few years ago and there were several papers that were locked behind a paywall without a free version available.
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