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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

#151

Post by ggg9990 »

pedrocr wrote: post #55
baxtr wrote: post #53

Former scientist here, too. People tend to forget what value a Nature article carries for the successful career in academia. The technical “hosting” of Nature and Arxiv might be the same, but the first will buy a lot of fame and potentially a good position at an research institute.

No one forgets that. Everyone just thinks we should solve the chicken-and-egg problem and move that prestige to a set of journals that don't gouge everyone for research that was mostly paid for by public money already and was peer-reviewed by public employees volunteering.

Prestige is one of the absolute hardest things to "move."

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

#152

Post by cossatot »

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?

Only math/physics/CS papers are put on arxiv. These are a small fraction of the total academic and industrial research output. In my own field, earth science, there is an arxiv-clone (eartharxiv.org) that is a few months old. I bet the majority of earth scientists (and certainly 90% of geologists) have never heard of arxiv.

Furthermore, many people just put pre-prints on arxiv etc. and don't update after peer review. Peer review is painful at best and quite flawed but the median paper is actually better after it, and many papers rightly don't make it through. Having open-access curated journals makes a lot of this better.

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

#153

Post by cossatot »

neolefty wrote: post #42

Could ML's open peer review practices be adopted by researchers in other fields?

Copernicus Publications publishes a host of journals, many on the behalf of non-profit scholarly and scientific societies [1]. For some or all of their journals, including those by the European Geosciences Union, peer review is open and there is a month-long public discussion forum for each manuscript.

I've got a paper in review with one of the journals right now, but several of my colleagues have expressed caution with open peer review. I think a lot of scientists are worried about making work public that hasn't been privately vetted during peer review, and maybe being caught with an embarrassing mistake.

[1]: https://publications.copernicus.org/

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

#155

Post by fwip »

segmondy wrote: post #154

It's really strange to me that in 2018, with open web and were we are publishing massive codebases on github that folks are still going through a paid/closed publisher to get published.

While many eyes may make all bugs shallow; getting those eyes isn't free.

That is, the primary value-add of the traditional paper publishing model is trust in the editorial staff and peer-reviewers. Anybody can throw up a repo on github - not everyone can get that repo published in Nature. Journals provide a curated list of exciting, valuable, and reliable research.

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

#156

Post by modeless »

cossatot wrote: post #149
modeless wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conferences can fill that role instead. Their business model doesn't require paywalls or the copyright police.

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.

Of course, but you don't need to attend the conference to read and benefit from the research, and that's the important thing.

The journal business model usually requires restricting access to the research, while the conference business model still works when the research is free.

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

#157

Post by IggleSniggle »

logicallee wrote: post #141
btilly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every forum has its own culture. The culture of this forum is against snarky humor that does not contribute substance.

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 >…

See, that contributed snark WITH substance. Gold star.

I’m not sure I totally agree with the parallels, which is probably where some of the initial confusion arose from. The printing press significantly reduced the costs of publication, allowing unprecedented access to the written word beyond the aristocracy. I don’t think anyone disagrees that Nature provides a valuable service and that it “makes sense to have a publishing house behind” peer reviewed literature. Rather, when the cost to produce peer-reviewed content can be taken on by tax-subsidized content production professionals, and demonstrably WITHOUT an older journal that extracts exorbitant fees without producing significant value beyond its brand-name, it makes sense to challenge the value of the brand.

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

#158

Post by ngold »

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.

Instead of prestige it would be nice to see successful replications.

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

#159

Post by fwip »

rlayton2 wrote: post #145
blauditore wrote: post #142

One thing I really wonder is wheather those costs are actually necessary for simple online publications: - Peer review is basically "free", meaning it's done by volunteers without compensation. - Hosting cost is magnitudes lower than publication/reading fees. A few dollars per paper should be enough by far. - Organisation of peer reviewing, editing and so on imposes some costs, but a lot of it could be automated and…

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.

You've got it backwards though.

A paper isn't good because it's in Nature - it's in Nature because it's good.

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

#160

Post by cossatot »

stanfordkid wrote: post #9
outlace wrote: post #7

If people can post a pre-print to Arxiv then why is it a big deal if it also gets published in Nature Machine Intelligence? Sure a better formatted and edited version may be behind a paywall but anyone can find the original arxiv paper and get the important points. edit: To make it clear, I'm talking about submitting to BOTH Arxiv, where it's freely available, AND a paywalled journal like Nature. edit 2: I get that w…

Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society. If "publishing in Nature" is no longer a credential for academics, then Nature can't charge universities big bucks... that money can be spent by institutions on other things (like funding GPU's to do more actual machine learning research)... so boycotting the journal is strictly a good thing.

This is absolutely wrong. Academic journals provide value through scientific aggregation, review, editorial curation, publication, archival curation, and promotion.

Yes, you can bypass all of this and put your non-reviewed pdfs on your personal website. No one will care, in part because no one will even know and if they do, they have to do the hard work of review in order to decide whether a paper is worth trusting. But how will anyone find out?

As an author, I've made a point never to publish in a paper not backed by a non-profit scientific society with a decent open-access policy, after doing so in the past. I also put all of my pdfs on my website including appropriate white papers that are working drafts, making it clear to others that they haven't been accepted through peer review.

As a reader, however, I keep up with the literature (aside from targeted Google Scholar searches) through Table of Contents emails from a few journals--mostly non-profit society journals but a few others including Nature. The editorial curation aspects which limit the number of accepted papers per issue make this possible. I'm not going to drink from the firehose of shit that is produced each month, especially before peer-review. Yeah, it sucks when your paper is accepted by reviewers but gets nixed by the editors because it's not cool enough, but... you know, get back to the bench and make it cooler if you want people to care. Welcome to the 21st century and attention scarcity.

You can change the name 'Nature' to whatever open-access journal you'd like, but the power behind it is that it's a sign that Important People have decided your paper is one of the 10 most impactful papers in your field that year. That's why people care.

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