May be these journals should move away from publishing and rather be in the business of curation from a source such as arxiv; Arxiv has a wealth of content, may be journals could sift through them and produce periodic curated lists of work that is the most significant.
Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
181–190 of 235 posts
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There must be some benefit to attending conferences, otherwise why would scientists attend them?
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#183Earlier 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…
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.
I think you're probably right. However, I wonder what sort of retaliation the first institution to do this might face from publishers. The publishing industry will have a mighty incentive to kill it and they tend to play hardball.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”...
Well, there are a couple ways it could happen.
1. The governmemt could require you to publish all your research in an open way, if it ever funded anything to do with your research. No open access, no government money.
2. Universities could band together and do something about it.
This could happen both on the demand side, AND on the supply sude. For example, they could either collectively refuse to pay for journals, OR collectively refuse to hire professors who don't publish open access.
Want to get Tenure? Well you are forced to publish open access. Don't like it? Then go find a different University to work for. But that might be difficult if those OTHER universies collude against you with the same rules.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
This forum in general values substantive comments like the second comment the OP made and doesn't value snarky one liners like the first one. That's the trade off for the value folks get from this forum. Other forums may have different cultures that may be more suitable for this particular viewpoint.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#186Some 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?
Jeff Dean is head of AI at Google. He's one of the most prolific computer scientists there, and has worked on many big projects such as MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, GoogleBrain and TensorFlow.
Yann LeCun is head of AI at Facebook and kinda knows as the father of convolutional networks.
There's a bunch of other ones from other big companies or big ivy league universities.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#187Wonder if we are repeating the sentiment from 1958: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184576
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There must be some benefit to attending conferences, otherwise why would scientists attend them?
That's the whole point. Conferences can provide a benefit worth paying for without putting the research itself behind paywalls like journals do.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#189What is the alternative here - there doesnt seem to be one.
Is there a open, free, peer-reviewed/crowd-reviewed journal paper website for artificial intelligence ?
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Just because somebody dosent like a joke doesn't mean they don't get it.