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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

#131

Post by dv_dt »

hannob wrote: post #128
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…

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".

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

#132

Post by jdietrich »

baxtr wrote: post #116
Barrin92 wrote: post #103

Earlier 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”...

... which is exactly our problem. Everyone (bar the publishers) hates the status quo, but nobody knows how to break it. My personal hope is that sci-hub will gradually erode the profitability of scientific publishing down to nothing, but breaking the stranglehold of publishers will almost certainly be a long and painful process.

http://honisoit.com/2015/11/the-dictatorship-with-no-dictato...

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

#133

Post by btilly »

modzu wrote: post #106
logicallee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are forgetting what year we're living in, 1818. It is not possible to publish something without setting moveable type made of lead. it would be different if there were an Internet or something but that's way in the future.

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.

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

#134

Post by jpeanuts »

njarboe wrote: post #127
cli wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

It is not blind for most science fields (I was not aware of any that were blind before reading this. PhD in Earth Science). What fields do you know of where journals send out papers for review with the author and his/her affiliation removed?

I've seen it exactly once (in a numerical analysis journal). Authors were blacked out. This was undermined almost immediately when the authors wrote in the introduction "... following previous work of the present authors [1]...".

Even if all these clues could be effectively removed, the nature of the research work, tools used, writing style, all unambiguously indicate authorship to someone in the field. I think for this reason double-blind review is not popular.

Which is not to say that it would be great if it were possible...

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

#135

Post by SpeciesInvader »

arthur_pryor wrote: post #113
blocked_again wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a centralized karma system like hacker news does?

because then you wouldn't get a chance to say "blockchain"

You could call it hn blockchain, but only if you paint it mauve...

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

#137

Post by namibj »

drb91 wrote: post #130
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.

Well, I’m not sure about “prestige”; it seems like another arbitrary metric to be gamed. However, I would like to easily see a non-political db where you can easily track the paper graph to figure out which papers are based on discredited research and/or researchers taking money from special interest groups.

Any (specific) idea how to get to that data? I might be interested in including this with some other, more general information-flow model{s,ing}. This part seems like making it publicly available would be a good thing, and possibly necessary, and likely aligned with the goals a likely choice of organization to host/maintain the technology would have.

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

#138

Post by robotresearcher »

make3 wrote: post #123
robotresearcher wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep learning, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio & Geoffrey Hinton, Nature volume 521, pages 436–444 (28 May 2015) Strategy: publish in the high-impact established Nature-family journal, but publicly boycott the no-impact new Nature-family journal. Win-win. edit: added -family suffix to clarify that I completely understand these are two different journals from the same publisher. edit 2: I now understand why the editor of th…

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 review. All the papers are free online before they even go to Nature. So this policy does not stifle or hinder research.

They also do not take copyright - it stays with the authors - unlike other giants such as IEEE.

To my mind the legitimate argument is about publishers taking undeserved profits from unpaid labour while adding little value.

(edit: reordered sentences)

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

#139

Post by drpgq »

sytelus wrote: post #32

While we are on the topic, why are we supporting IEEE? They have so many valuable as well as historical papers behind their paywall. I'm IEEE member and want to find out what can I do about this.

I find it irritating as an IEEE member that you don't get access to everything with a membership.

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

#140

Post by make3 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #122
make3 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yoshua Bengio doesn't work for a large brand

For the unfamiliar, Bengio has his own company: https://www.elementai.com/en/who-we-are

He still spends most of his time at MILA, of which he is the director, which is UdeM and McGill's shared AI research group. source: I study there.

http://mila.quebec/

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