Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

The substance is that in 1818 you can't publish a serious journal to be read by scientists all over the world without expensive typesetting, printing, and so forth. (Setting moveable type, etc.) Typesetting a journal is hard work with high fixed and variable costs.

To give you a sense of the state of our industry, here is an example of an innovation just four years ago and its effect:

>1814 – First cylinder presses

>Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer build their first cylinder press, which is much faster than the existing flatbed presses. One of the first customers is John Walter of The Times. The first issue of The Times that is printed with the new presses is published in 1814. The press is installed in secret to avoid sabotage by disgruntled pressmen operating the existing Stanhope presses. The machine is capable of printing over 1100 double-sided sheets per hour. In 1817 Koenig & Bauer return to Germany and start building presses in an abandoned monastery in Würzburg.

https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/1800-1849

You can click that link for some pictures. This press needs to be paid for, as well as having ongoing operational costs that include a lot of meticulous manual labor (mentioned above) to set each and every page.

Here is another link which I rewrite to the present:

>There are many reasons to celebrate the advent of the steam press in 1814, as well as reasons to worry about it. Steam printing brings the cost of printing down, increases the number of possible impressions per day by four times, and, in a way, we might say that it helps “democratize” access to information. The Times proclaims that the introduction of steam is the “greatest improvement” to printing since its very invention. Further down that page, which itself is “taken off last night by a mechanical apparatus,” we read why the hand press printers might be concerned: “after the letters are placed by the compositors… little more remains for man to do, than to attend upon, and watch this unconscious agent in its operations.”

https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/steam-press-newspaper-london-ti...

As you can see it talks about "the democratization" of information. Still, my point is that the fixed costs of this publishing model are still high, and that it makes a lot of sense to operate on this publishing model for this reason alone. After reviewing my links and the technology in question, I hope you can readily agree! In 1818 typesetting and printing is an expensive, hardware-based, industrial business. It makes sense to have a publishing house behind it.

Is there any part of what I've just written that you disagree with?

i'm moderately hopeful that we'll get that sort of querying for free* as the semantic web matures, and we can better query federated linked data. university libraries are pretty keen on making that dream a reality (and this is the sort of use-case that makes them want to be able to do that, though they'd probably pitch the rosier version, where they show the indirect impact of a well-regarded paper or study, because that sells better than the doom-n-gloom version described here, even if that version is just as important).

* or if not "free", a very small marginal cost, in terms of say data aggregation and programming effort

Prestige is a made up concept to keep the big players at the top. If the paper is good then it shouldn't matter where it's published.

Nature used to be a prestigious journal. But its spinoffs, not so much. When they stuck to bio, they were good. Computer science, not so good. Nature Energy's hype pieces from flaky battery inventors have been mentioned on HN.

All the conferences in my field have literal security guards checking the badges that are only handed out after paying hundreds of dollars to register.