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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

#171

Post by Iv »

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…

I still think that "Journal of the MIT AI lab" or "Tokyo University Official Journal" would have no problem in establishing prestige if they were to try it.

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

#172

Post by Iv »

sanxiyn wrote: post #164
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.

You should cite "A Proposed Currency System for Academic Peer Review Payments Using the BlockChain Technology". Abstract here: http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/5/3/19

I think this is one of the rare cases where blockchains can actually provide good values: we could potentially get third parties of trust eventually to make a blockchain unnecessary but for now, the established parties are unethical and entrenched.

I hope this publication gets an implementation soon.

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

#173

Post by amorphid »

I have a thought... Force car owners, business or consumer, to buy driverless car insurance. No insurance, no autonomous vehicle functionality. Insurance companies would love a new market opportunity, and they'd lead the push to make driverless cars safe enough to insure.

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

#175

Post by modzu »

btilly wrote: post #133
modzu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

but there is substance to the joke above. so either its over people's head (as it seems to be on you) which is a shame as HN tends to have fairly intelligent culture, or else its not lost on the audience but they don't appreciate anything inexplicit or non literal, ie, humour, which is also a shame

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

#176

Post by modzu »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #157
logicallee wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pub…

look at what they had to write for that gold star tho, to make the same point! good grief! ppl on HN be self employed, working few hours and all, but still, thats time he aint gettin back ;P

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

#177

Post by blt »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #41
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.

Deepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.

but they also seek publications in the main Nature, which is unusual in the field.

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

#178

Post by [deleted] »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #157
logicallee wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pub…

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by imjustsaying »

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.

Literally Who: The List

got some references as to why they are big hitters for the uninformed such as myself?

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #157
logicallee wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pub…

[deleted]
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