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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

#211

Post by thedailymail »

garmaine wrote: post #162
andreyk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue good editing and curation is of high value. Not sure I buy it, but Arxiv certainly lacks curation or editing...

Sure, if the publisher actually provides that. They don’t. (Or rather, they farm it out to volunteer labor while collecting a fee anyway.)

Nature journals actually do provide professional copyediting services for all articles accepted for publication. For commentaries (from my own experience), the editing process at Nature is quite intensive.

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

#212

Post by practice9 »

williamscales wrote: post #183
Iv wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless some sort of millionaire / billionaire (Thiel / Musk / Bezos, i.e. one of guys the hated by HN, just kidding) will be behind this open-source journal.

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

#213

Post by called_it »

nunya213 wrote: post #93
Fins wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kind of a hard stance to enforce. If you work for basically any major corporate entity you are probably sacrificing integrity to do so. So it seems you are calling the kettle black here.

How is it hard to dismiss the moral advice of people who lack integrity?

> it seems you are calling the kettle black here.

Because it's "probably" in your opinion that they sacrificed integrity, it "seems" like that's not just probable, but fact? Nonsense, even before getting into how you just equate any lack of integrity with any other, as if it was binary, instead of a matter of degree.

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

#214

Post by codegladiator »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #190
modzu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because somebody doesn't like a joke doesn't mean there is no substance in it.

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

#215

Post by collyw »

gowld wrote: post #81
collyw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With biology at least a lot of your reputation relies on your reputation, and a lot of that comes from publications and the impact factor of the journals you publish in, Nature being the one to aim for. Not sure if its as relevant to AI.

Computer science doesn't need journals because (1) It's generally easy enough to reproduce any work you care about, so you don't need to take anyone's word for its correctness, and (2) researches can make a fortune in industry doing their (profoitable) work or something related, so the don't need to suck up prestige factories in order to get funding.

I was thinking as well that its less abstract. Biology research takes a lot time and of work to filer through to practical applications. AI research is generally doing something practical straight away.

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

#217

Post by chrisseaton »

Pywarrior wrote: post #216

Who runs Nature, why don't you all hold the actual people personally responsible? Change in leadership.

How are you going to change the leadership of a company you don't own? What are you planning we do? Get together and buy 51% of RELX? It's a $33 billion company.

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

#218

Post by [deleted] »

icc97 wrote: post #31
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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#219

Post by nonbel »

nonbel wrote: post #126
gowld wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a publicly-funded paper that you couldn't find on PubMed or another server, but a Nature or another closed journal offers for sale?

Sure, go to Nature Medicine: https://www.nature.com/nm/ Click the first research article they show. It has various public funding sources: "The collection of the ELC and genetic data for the American samples was supported by direct funding from the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH to the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch (D.R.W., PI, protocol 95-M-0150, NCT00001486, annual report number: ZIA MH002942-05), with s…

And here is the pubmed link (only abstract available): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29808008

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

#220

Post by aeorgnoieang »

Vinnl wrote: post #202
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming that most research is already freely available and yet everyone is, for some unspecified reason, still paying publishers for an extraneous service? The NIH site links right to PubMed Central from which it seems like it'd be 'easy' to find a paper for which I know the title. None of the pages on the NSF site ever seemed to be intended for someone that's not contributing to the 'public access repositor…

> Are you claiming that most research is already freely available and yet everyone is, for some unspecified reason, still paying publishers for an extraneous service? I'm not sure about the NSF, however: this is what is happening in some disciplines. ArXiv is the default method of sharing research in some fields, and also the default method of actually reading and reviewing those articles, yet people still submit the…

I'm with you on all of what you wrote and that is my understanding too.

But you didn't explain, relative to how I interpreted the comment to which I initially replied, why, e.g. libraries, are paying so much money to access journals. If the default method for reading those articles is ArXiv, what's the point of paying a subscription to the other journals? My model of academia isn't that it's that dysfunctional. I'd expect enough internal pressure to re-allocate those funds if ('read') access was really unnecessary.

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