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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

#121

Post by mirimir »

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…

That's basically how major journals got started, long ago. Most were essentially not-for-profit. But then, since the 70s, they've been acquired by large publishers. And those new owners have been monetizing those journals' prestige and market share. Given the inertia of the academic community, they've had a long run at that. But the end is coming, I think.

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

#122

Post by robotresearcher »

make3 wrote: post #120
icc97 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For the unfamiliar, Bengio has his own company:

https://www.elementai.com/en/who-we-are

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

#123

Post by make3 »

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…

there's a huge difference between publishing one really general public descriptive article for the whole field and stifling research by having actual research papers published in a closed journal.

one doesn't hinder research, the other does

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

#125

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

cli wrote: post #47
apetresc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?

The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

Agreed. Within my own field, there are less than 10 people who are presently working on the same topics as I do. Consequently, we are constantly asked to review each other’s papers, and it is pretty trivial to tell who the author is, either because of the views and interests shown in the paper, or because of language use (i.e. you can tell that the author is a native speaker of the language in which the paper was written, or from their unidiomatic skills in it you can often guess at their native language).

The hard part in this is remaining silent and pretending you don’t know anything about this, when you meet your peers at conferences.

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

#126

Post by nonbel »

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?

Sure, go to Nature Medicine: https://www.nature.com/nm/

Click the first research article they show. It has various public funding sources:

"The collection of the ELC and genetic data for the American samples was supported by direct funding from the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH to the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch (D.R.W., PI, protocol 95-M-0150, NCT00001486, annual report number: ZIA MH002942-05), with supplemental analytic support from the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Branch (K.F.B., PI). G.U. received partial support from P50MH094268." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0021-y

Check that other site: https://par.nsf.gov/search/term:%22Convergence%20of%20placen...

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

#127

Post by njarboe »

cli wrote: post #47
apetresc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?

The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

It is not blind for most science fields (I was not aware of any that were blind before reading this. PhD in Earth Science). What fields do you know of where journals send out papers for review with the author and his/her affiliation removed?

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

#128

Post by hannob »

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…

A lot of people want to do exactly this.

The problem is that changing an existing culture that is deep in everything how this system works is difficult. This goes way beyond the mere question of publication, it's still pretty common to hire people based on high impact factor journal publications etc.

You're faced with a system that's controlled by the people who made their career in this system. They're not the most qualified to improve the failures of that system. Changing it is possible, but it's hard and it's a slow process.

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

#129

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

thousandautumns wrote: post #95
SiempreViernes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but think about all the trash they must reject if they let the questionable things trough. I’m also more sceptic that the flagship journals actually have declined, at least in part I suspect the critsism is just complains in the spirit of those about ”the youth of today”.

Actually, some of the biggest problems with modern science are directly caused by journals. One problem is that because they publish the most eye opening studies, they are inherently biasing the results they publish to extreme findings that are anomalous or don't represent reality. If 20 scientists are all conducting similar experiments, a typical experiment design would expect 1 of them to find a statistically signi…

> One problem is that because they publish the most eye opening studies

Is this really the case? In my own field, it is quite common for us to publish only slight increments of existing knowledge, or we simply debunk an earlier paper. I have also done some work in scientific editing for scholars in other fields, and from what I’ve seen, it seems that they, too, publish similar minor work, even literature reviews where the author does not make any original claims but only summarizes what is out there, and these do get accepted and published.

I can definitely imagine that a few über-high-profile journals like Nature might want the flashiest claims and discoveries, but there is a whole world of publishing out there.

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

#130

Post by drb91 »

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.

Well, I’m not sure about “prestige”; it seems like another arbitrary metric to be gamed.

However, I would like to easily see a non-political db where you can easily track the paper graph to figure out which papers are based on discredited research and/or researchers taking money from special interest groups.

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