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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

#221

Post by stanfordkid »

cossatot wrote: post #160
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.

This is absolutely wrong. Academic journals provide value through scientific aggregation, review, editorial curation, publication, archival curation, and promotion. Yes, you can bypass all of this and put your non-reviewed pdfs on your personal website. No one will care, in part because no one will even know and if they do, they have to do the hard work of review in order to decide whether a paper is worth trusting.…

Maybe I should have stated it as "paid academic journals don't create any marginal value for society vs. unpaid journals"

Nature is just a bunch of noted academics that come together and do peer-review (for free btw)... is that enough value creation to charge exorbitant amounts to universities and block content to the public that is funded by government grants?

If academics could build a peer-review board themselves (hint: now they can... thanks internet!) ... then everyone would have free access to science.

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

#222

Post by Vinnl »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #220
Vinnl wrote: post #202

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? 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 e…

Right, that's an interesting observation as well. The number of journals is huge. What this means is that libraries usually do not buy individual subscriptions. Instead, what happens is that they negotiate so-called "Big Deals" with the big traditional publishers. In other words, they pay a large sum of money for a package of subscriptions to a large number of journals from a single publisher. Typically, these packages contain a few of the really big name journals, and a really long tail of journals of varying relevance. Publishers also own many journals which presumably mainly exist to boost those numbers in order to negotiate a higher price, and also has the effect of removing downwards price pressure by decreasing transparency in the market. Theoretically, the per-journal price is a lot lower in such a big deal than individual subscriptions would have been, but it's not quite clear how many of those subscriptions you really need.

Of course, "need" is already a vague term - preferably, all publicly funded research would be available in the first place, but that's not the world we currently live in.

Unfortunately, that's both the reason why adding a subscription journal instead of an Open Access one is bad, as well as why a boycott doesn't affect much change other than that resulting of its publicity. On the scale of those big deals, saying "we don't need that specific ML journal since interesting research hardly gets submitted there" doesn't drive the collective price down that much.

(In fact, I'd wager that those prices are mostly driven by how far librarians managed to stretch their budgets, rather than by the value provided by the specific included journals or the cost spent producing them.)

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

#223

Post by nunya213 »

pathseeker wrote: post #107
nunya213 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Equating all major corporate entities is a cop-out.

I clearly left room for some corps to escape my characterization so there's no cop-out, sorry.

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

#224

Post by garmaine »

rocqua wrote: post #163
garmaine wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, they don’t. The “volunteer” reviewers are drawn from past published authors, who in turn had their articles selected by previously published reviewers. Turtles all the way down.

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

#225

Post by Fins »

Vinnl wrote: post #196
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.

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.

Oh, it might be valid, in regards to the magazine, alright. It just smacks of hypocrisy when their research is pretty much bound to be used for unethical purposes.

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

#226

Post by robotresearcher »

garmaine wrote: post #224
rocqua wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, they don’t. The “volunteer” reviewers are drawn from past published authors, who in turn had their articles selected by previously published reviewers. Turtles all the way down.

This is not true. Reviewers may or may not have been past authors. I have reviewed for many journals in which I have never published.

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

#227

Post by rowaway93 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #41
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.

Deepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.

Everything? They publish basically extended abstracts, nothing that could be confidently reproduced, nor code ... or I just don't know how to read it and find supplemental material. There's a lot in the bibliography. Really just a journal article, an entry in a log book.

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

#228

Post by rowaway93 »

a1369209993 wrote: post #166
IggleSniggle wrote: post #157

Earlier 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…

> 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.

If you have to pay royalties to use a digital font, it stands to reason you have to pay royalties to the keepers of information. Why that's elsevier et al all I don't know, but they are is the only logical conclusion.

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

#229

Post by stefek99 »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

"setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT"

INFORMATION IS FREE:

"Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release."

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

#230

Post by MaupitiBlue »

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…

Why not adopt the legal profession's approach and have grad students operate the journals? I.e. Harvard Law Review?
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