Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you an IEEE member? Can't you just be not.
That doesn't solve the problem of getting open access to IEEE published papers.
They have DOI numbers, don't they? So you can just use sci-hub.
Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
191–200 of 235 posts
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#192Earlier 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?
Yeah, but it's usually more about a chance to socialize with other people in the field.
It's also interesting to hear other people's talks that serve as a "teaser" for what's in the paper.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#193Earlier 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.
Except that conference proceedings can be exactly like a journal, i.e. you often need to pay to access them.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Their policy: "Nature Research journals support posting of primary research manuscripts on community preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv. Preprint posting is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Research journals." https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html Standard practice in the modern AI community is preprint to arXiv first, then out to a journal for re…
> To my mind the legitimate argument is about publishers taking undeserved profits from unpaid labour while adding little value.
That argument also comes down to hindering research. Funds that could otherwise be used for research are now used to buy subscriptions to this journal.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#195Some 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.
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.
That's what makes their support so important. If they're not publishing there, then the external brand value of this specific journal goes down, which means that even for less heavy hitters, the best "brand" value is still in the journals that actually make their work as widely available as possible.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also many folks from Facebook AI Research (including Yann LeCun)
Not to say that they are wrong in boycotting, but I find it hard to take seriously a moral stance from somebody working for Facebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Just because their parent company might not be morally in the clear, that doesn't mean that moral criticisms by its employees is automatically or even more likely to be invalid.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#197Admittedly 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…
The way to think about this is an article in Nature is like winning a tiny Nobel prize, with no prize money. You can make whatever other sensible publication outlet you like, but it's hard to create something that has the prestige of winning a tiny Nobel prize. That's Nature's value proposition. Brand, history and exclusivity. This is why you can't get too angry at the scientists who continue to publish in it. If you…
I don't think Sci-Hub breaks the loop. Researchers still need to publish with the mini Nobel prizes to advance their career in a highly competitive field, and governments/funders still don't want to dictate where researchers get to publish their work, so in effect, what happens is that governments mandate Open Access and pay the same old publishers significant (and disproportionate) amounts of money to make the single articles they fund openly available. In other words, the costs of research still don't go down, and the government-mandates were happening without Sci-Hub as well...
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#198Admittedly 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.
The Guardian had a great longread describing that history: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
And I'm afraid that, even though a lot is changing, the disproportionate monetising isn't yet done for.
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities could be in conflict of interest - organizing review of competing (or worse its own) research
Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?
Blinding is not as effective as you'd think: http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2017/10/31/the-fractu...
Re: Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
One hopes it will change faster than the typical "one a death at a time".
Well, the Open Access movement has been going at it for more than two decades now, so don't get your hopes up...
(That said, it's definitely not like nothing has changed! There's a lot changing at the moment, and it's not quite sure what the system is going to look like. Traditional publishers aren't looking too bad yet, though.)