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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

#101

Post by xtracto »

alexbeloi wrote: post #51
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 j…

This is good for blockchain...

In all seriousness, I have always thought that Blockchain could pose a good solution for the issue of peer-reviewing scientific papers. It provides a descentralized infrastructure with "tokens" that can be transferred to provide "prestige" to papers and authors.

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

#102

Post by stilley2 »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #99
stilley2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Thanks for the demo! That papers will eventually (and mostly) be freely available is good and I am surprised that that seems to be the case. Thanks for sharing this info! But an embargo or delay in publishing to the free access sites is probably sufficient for the existing closed-access journals to maintain their value. I can't imagine researchers, and thus universities, forgoing access to current research.

I should point out that I believe these policies are relatively recent, so old articles may be paywalled for a while...

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

#103

Post by Barrin92 »

nunya213 wrote: post #97
Barrin92 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 immediate…

But Arxiv has been around for years and the Journals haven't died yet.

Just offering a superior platform is not enough, as said in the last post, you also must create a way to collectively move everybody over and break the feedback loop of prestige journals.

The same happens with social networks. You could offer the freest, most privacy respecting network of all, as long as individuals get punished for leaving the old one individually it'll never take over a significant amount of market share, even if everyone on the old network agrees that the newer one is better.

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

#104

Post by Fins »

nunya213 wrote: post #93
Fins wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kind of a hard stance to enforce. If you work for basically any major corporate entity you are probably sacrificing integrity to do so. So it seems you are calling the kettle black here.

Not quite every corp out there has a business model of specifically misusing and abusing personal information, manipulating peoples' emotions, etc., etc.

I work for a rather minor corporate entity anyway, does it mean that I am always off the hook? /s

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

#105

Post by a-dub »

gowld wrote: post #87
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.

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the vast majority of NPG's revenue comes from institutional subscriptions and that the vast majority of those institutions make use of NPG's review/editorial process.

I guess there's less of a notion of the accumulation of valuable property in the pay to publish regime.

But seriously, just call the subscriptions "membership fees." Revenue would probably dip 5% from non-publisher subscriptions and things would stabilize.

It would also neutralize the threat of open access journals gaining more ground.

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

#106

Post by modzu »

logicallee wrote: post #39
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.

it seems fewer and fewer people know how to take a joke

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

#107

Post by pathseeker »

nunya213 wrote: post #93
Fins wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kind of a hard stance to enforce. If you work for basically any major corporate entity you are probably sacrificing integrity to do so. So it seems you are calling the kettle black here.

Equating all major corporate entities is a cop-out.

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

#108

Post by Moter8 »

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?

It's not the hosting, but the publication process, I think.

I am not involved in this stuff, just read quite some posts on StackExchange Academia.

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

#109

Post by blocked_again »

xtracto wrote: post #101
alexbeloi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 j…

This is good for blockchain... In all seriousness, I have always thought that Blockchain could pose a good solution for the issue of peer-reviewing scientific papers. It provides a descentralized infrastructure with "tokens" that can be transferred to provide "prestige" to papers and authors.

Why not use a centralized karma system like hacker news does?

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

#110

Post by jly »

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…

> None of the pages on the NSF site ever seemed to be intended for someone that's not contributing to the 'public access repository'.

I had this issue, too, but there is a simple search engine at this URL: https://par.nsf.gov

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