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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

#111

Post by arthur_pryor »

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.

...right, but then you have to figure out explicit metrics for determining what "prestige" is, and you have to explicitly implement the mechanics of it. i think this is a worthwhile research project of its own (or many research projects). but the mapping is very much non-trivial. i think the amount that people complain about how poorly the usual social media ontology ("friends", "likes", etc) maps to the "real"-world equivalent shows that this isn't something were you can just be like "we'll implement a first-pass of the blockchain thing now, and we'll refine the granularity of our prestige tokens later". thanks, but no thanks.

which is all to say, like so many of the things people want to use a block chain for, the hard part is the politics and the real-world nuance, not the immutable ledger. the immutable ledger is not trivial. but compared to the other stuff, it's not all that hard (and is certainly more solved, at this point).

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

#112

Post by nonbel »

gowld wrote: post #84
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/

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

>"6-months embargo paralyzes progress."

As long as they put the code on github or a blog or whatever then who really cares? Do people really get that much out of these academic style papers in this field? They are more like a press release.

Or are you saying this embargo also actively prevents them from sharing stuff beyond the document, like the code?

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

#113

Post by arthur_pryor »

blocked_again wrote: post #109
xtracto wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

because then you wouldn't get a chance to say "blockchain"

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

#114

Post by jri939mcko »

Fins wrote: post #104
nunya213 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s a wobbly ethical stance, since you’re tacitly supporting nation state economy and its stewards that actively harm humanity, and ignore mountains of evidence that it is doing so, while peddling “only Facebook”, a Johnny Come-lately relatively, are involved in economic evil

I suppose one can equivocate that away with “I’m just following orders.”

But as a scientist, I have a hard time accepting everyone else “believing they are right” making it ok for me to also accept a result that has plainly been rigged into existence given historical records of merit

I’m really rather indifferent to supporting the efforts rich people seek

Yet if I want any real quality of life... kowtow cause everyone else is

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

#115

Post by aeorgnoieang »

jly wrote: post #110
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…

> 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

Thanks! That looks like exactly what I was missing.

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

#116

Post by baxtr »

Barrin92 wrote: post #103
nunya213 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everybody would agree on this - in theory. But you don’t say how this should happen, and this is where it breaks down. The only thing that comes to mind is “magic”...

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

#117

Post by aeorgnoieang »

stilley2 wrote: post #102
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah; I saw that in another comment. Still, this is very good news. Hopefully everything will be freely available someday soonish, and without embargoes or delays.

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

#118

Post by japanuspus »

stilley2 wrote: post #102
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To put "relatively recent" in context, I know for a fact that these rules were already in place in 2005 (source: was doing DARPA-funded research).

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

#119

Post by Tomminn »

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 way to think about this is an article in Nature is like winning a tiny Nobel prize, with no prize money. You can make whatever other sensible publication outlet you like, but it's hard to create something that has the prestige of winning a tiny Nobel prize. That's Nature's value proposition. Brand, history and exclusivity.

This is why you can't get too angry at the scientists who continue to publish in it. If you kill yourself to figure something out worthy of a tiny Nobel prize, are you really not going to claim it? It's not like claiming that tiny Nobel prize is gonna hurt the dissemination of your work. The higher profile of your work will easily compensate for the fact people have to jump through a hoop to read it.

This is why I love sci-hub. It just destroys the hoop. It doesn't need to figure out how to replace the brand, history and exclusivity of publications like Nature. Along with government-mandated open source laws, it's one of the only realistic ways to actually disrupt this industry.

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

#120

Post by make3 »

icc97 wrote: post #31
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.

Not that I'm for journals, but those heavy hitters typically have their own brand in that of Google or Microsoft etc. Without an external 'brand' of Nature the importance of working for the recognised companies when submitting your research papers goes up.

Yoshua Bengio doesn't work for a large brand
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