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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

#161

Post by cossatot »

mooneater wrote: post #11
stanfordkid wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society. If "publishing in Nature" is no longer a credential for academics, then Nature can't charge universities big bucks... that money can be spent by institutions on other things (like funding GPU's to do more actual machine learning research)... so boycotting the journal is strictly a good thing.

Hopefully all that money does not have to go into GPUs! Universities in less rich countries would be on a more level playing field, if these massive subscriptions were not table stakes.

Universities in developing nations get heavily discounted if not free subscription and individual access fees to most journals. Library subscriptions are negotiated on a school-by-school basis and you can be sure that a university in sub-Saharan Africa isn't paying the same as Yale.

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

#162

Post by garmaine »

andreyk wrote: post #144
robotresearcher wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.)

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

#163

Post by rocqua »

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.)

That just pushes out the argument by one level of indirection. The publishers 'curate and edit' the board of editors for their journals. In turn, these boards of editors curate and edit the articles that go into the journal.

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

#164

Post by sanxiyn »

xtracto wrote: post #101
alexbeloi wrote: post #51

Earlier 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…

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

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

#165

Post by rocqua »

ngold wrote: post #158
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.

Instead of prestige it would be nice to see successful replications.

That works for experimental stuff, but a lot of work is theoretical. Consider most of mathematics or theoretical physics. There is no real replication here. Instead, the test is strong peer review, combined with publication to a wider audience.

Similar issues occur for review articles, which are about analyzing data already present rather than analyzing new data. Moreover, this would also hurt actual replications. It kind of seems like being the last to replicate something would be without compensation.

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

#166

Post by a1369209993 »

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…

> I don't think anyone disagrees that Nature provides a valuable service

Ooh, ooh! raises hand and waves franticly

Nature does jack shit that couldn't be (and in many cases isn't) done as well or better by the authors' personal or institutional websites.

What they "provide" is a brand name for wasteful status signalling, the same as Goochi purses or sportsball teams.

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

#167

Post by salty_biscuits »

Barrin92 wrote: post #103
nunya213 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Arxiv has been around for years and the Journals haven't died yet.

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…

I'd say arxiv isn't a superior platform. It is in that it is free, but it is the filtering effect of peer review that seems important. I'd say you don't need to actually filter, just some sort of measure of quality to make searching easy. I look for papers these days by hopping links on google scholar citations. This works well for finding good "older" papers. I want a mechanism for quickly finding good new papers. Then you have your superior platform.

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

#168

Post by fourthark »

blauditore wrote: post #142

One thing I really wonder is wheather those costs are actually necessary for simple online publications: - Peer review is basically "free", meaning it's done by volunteers without compensation. - Hosting cost is magnitudes lower than publication/reading fees. A few dollars per paper should be enough by far. - Organisation of peer reviewing, editing and so on imposes some costs, but a lot of it could be automated and…

I have heard the organization, editing, and publication cost is underestimated because it's really boring work and not as automatible as you might think.

But it's still not high enough to justify journal subscription prices.

I don't know if typical open access journal fees are lower margin or not.

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

#169

Post by cli »

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?

Nature offers a double-blind option for peer review: https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/peer_review.html?&$N...

See the "anonymity" section.

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

#170

Post by fourthark »

nunya213 wrote: post #96
bitL wrote: post #91

What's the point of journals these days, especially in computing with reproducible results (i.e. authors publish a paper on arxiv, code & dataset on github)?

Reproducible results? lol. A fraction of researchers actually put out code and data freely, definitely not a majority.

And even when it's out, does the code actually run?

Designing your code and data so it's truly reproducible is a ton of work, and most researchers are focused on the paper.

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