Why Thousands of AI Researchers Are Boycotting the New Nature Journal (theguardian.com) 62
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via The Guardian, written by Neil Lawrence, the founding editor of the freely available journal Proceedings of Machine Learning Research: Machine learning has demonstrated that an academic field can not only survive, but thrive, without the involvement of commercial publishers. But this has not stopped traditional publishers from entering the market. Our success has caught their attention. Most recently, the publishing conglomerate Springer Nature announced a new journal targeted at the community called Nature Machine Intelligence. The publisher now has 53 journals that bear the Nature name. Should we be concerned? What would drive authors and readers towards a for-profit subscription journal when we already have an open model for sharing our ideas? Academic publishers have one card left to play: their brand. The diversity and quantity of academic research means that it is difficult for a researcher in one field to rate the work in another. Sometimes a journal's brand is used as a proxy for quality. When academics look for promotion, having papers in a "brand-name journal" can be a big help. Nature is the Rolex of academic publishing. But in contrast to Rolex, whose staff are responsible for the innovation in its watches, Nature relies on academics to provide its content. We are the watchmakers, they are merely the distributors.
Many in our research community see the Nature brand as a poor proxy for academic quality. We resist the intrusion of for-profit publishing into our field. As a result, at the time of writing, more than 3,000 researchers, including many leading names in the field from both industry and academia, have signed a statement refusing to submit, review or edit for this new journal. We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine-learning research. We believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine-learning community would be a retrograde step.
Many in our research community see the Nature brand as a poor proxy for academic quality. We resist the intrusion of for-profit publishing into our field. As a result, at the time of writing, more than 3,000 researchers, including many leading names in the field from both industry and academia, have signed a statement refusing to submit, review or edit for this new journal. We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine-learning research. We believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine-learning community would be a retrograde step.
Maybe not (Score:2, Funny)
It's not thousands, one guy merely made a bot that emulated thousands of researchers.
This story is a Dupe from a month ago (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This story is a Dupe from a month ago (Score:5, Funny)
I'm boycotting slashdot's dupe-detection technology. I'm boycotting slashdot's dupe-detection technology.
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I'm boycotting slashdot's dupe-detection technology.
I'm boycotting the boycotts! I
I'm boycotting slashdot's dupe-detection technology
Please add me to the boycott list!
Me too!
Re:This story is a Dupe from a month ago (Score:5, Informative)
Last time it was 2000 signatures. This time it's 3000 signatures.
For every extra 1000 signatures (from people who actually belong to the field), I'll gladly read this submission again for the rest of my biological span.
It's another story about the academic journals (Score:1)
I want to get in before the ignorant people who defend these slimeballs.
The academic journal publishers add literally zero value.
They don't edit, they don't pay authors or reviewers (usually authors pay)--all they do is print the author's PDFs and bundle them into a magazine, then hold the copyright themselves and lock down the knowledge until the heat death of the universe.
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They are less bad than you indicate. Slightly.
The problem is the authority worshiping administrators who just the quality of the faculty without any knowledge of the areas they are judging. It's important to not lest Springer-Verlag get established as an authority in a field...because less bad certainly doesn't mean good.
Value 0 but not by much (Score:2)
The academic journal publishers add literally zero value.
That's not really true: the best journals act as a filter which both checks the articles for both rigour and relevance. This does add some value but, in the modern world, there are now far better ways to do this than via journals because we no longer need them to provide typesetting and printing. Even worse, as publishers flood the market with lots of new journals each year, many of which have extremely dubious editorial practices, more and more journals don't even provide this level of value.
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I want to get in before the ignorant people who defend these slimeballs. The academic journal publishers add literally zero value. They don't edit, they don't pay authors or reviewers (usually authors pay)--all they do is print the author's PDFs and bundle them into a magazine, then hold the copyright themselves and lock down the knowledge until the heat death of the universe.
I have no idea if you are correct about Nature (as there is no Nature journal in my field), but I have written for many journals and presses and not once has one ever simply re-printed my PDF.
I know why (Score:3)
...because Slashdot keeps asking me to agree to some bullshit privacy policy, every fucking time I visit it.
The AI researchers were informed and they're now on strike.
Too bad their AI misunderstood which website to boycott.
"Our Field"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:"Our Field"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The new "AI" people are rehashing the same drivel that was done 40 years ago.
Well, back in the mid to late 80's, we had Expert Systems . . . which was what marketing folks call AI today.
Grid Computing didn't sell well . . . so we renamed it Cloud Computing.
So you don't want to buy Pervasive Computing? Try a healthy vegan alternative order of IoT instead.
I am, of course, over-exaggerating . . . but it's good, wholesome, Christian, CS fun.
I invite others to come up with more examples . . .
Hey, don't blame environmental damage on IT folks . . . we are experts in recycling . . . ideas . . .
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There are new developments, especially since the 1950's. Developments along with hardware that made it more economical to use the technology instead of letting it sit in a 1950's lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
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"Our definitions"? (Score:1)
That's nice. The biggest issue with all those examples is the assumption that nothing has changed from back then to now. From better hardware, to better understanding of particular fields. Expert systems (rules based) isn't the same as A.I. (neural net based). Grid Computing is more like cluster computing. While cloud is pool-based resources, not necessarily related to each other.
Re: "Our definitions"? (Score:2)
Neural networks are only one approach to AI. Not all AI uses neural networks.
Don't forget fuzzy logic (Score:2)
Don't forget fuzzy logic.
Also theorem proving machines (proving all possible theorems), formal logic, and cybernetics.
Semantic nets, svms, ... the list goes on.
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Well, back in the mid to late 80's, we had Expert Systems . . . which was what marketing folks call AI today. I haven't seen many people doing Expert Systems recently (is anyone?). Most of the big hype is around deep learning, which is a lot of data combined with a neural network. Admittedly neural networks have been around for a while.
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On another note ... (Score:2)
... the paying audience defines the value of content.
For reference, see Fox News, CNN.
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So does the news.
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Ever hear of Copenhagen?
publishing conglomerate Springer Nature (Score:2)
is that something to do with Jerry Springer ?
explain journals to me ? (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, I understand what a journal is and why they are there - after all a somewhat centralized publishing system for scientific papers makes sense. And I can see someone submitting a paper, just so it will be distributed to their peers.
But with the Internet being part of academia, etc. for several decades now, how is that NEW journals are starting up? Do these brilliant scientific minds, researchers, etc. not know how to "Export to PDF" and upload to a web server? Do the institutions and corporations these people work for not have some help desk flunky that can do it for them?
There is no/minimal review of submissions (I've seen quite a few "spoof paper published by ..." articles here on /.), they cost teh subscribers a lot, etc. What is the upside for NEW stuff? Again, I somewhat understand older journals that have extensive pre-electronic archives, etc.
Or is this just a self correcting problem, and once the luddites die or retire out things will be all web based and relatively freely accessible? Just think, in 30 years people will be flopping back and forth between JournalSpace and InstaArticle and FaceJournal, with a few hold outs posting on a simple webserver
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Peer review is actually alive and well, and the "spoof paper published" articles you see are visible enough to be seen because they're the exception rather than the rule. I've negatively reviewed papers such that they didn't get accepted, and I've had my own work negatively reviewed such that it didn't get accepted.
If you move to a "any random person self-published a PDF" model, you're basically giving up on the concept of peer review, which is a big part of science.
But nowhere in peer review does it say we
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>If you move to a "any random person self-published a PDF" model, you're basically giving up on the concept of peer review, which is a big part of science.
Not really. Peer review, which I've done in the past, depends on the reputation of the reviewer and indirectly on that of the publisher.
It would not be a stretch to take a site such as arxiv and add reputation and review management along with a public discussion forum. A small endowment would likely cover the cost of managing the reputation side, after
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Human resources is the answer you are looking for. People that just want to do the work publish on their own websites, blogs, go to conferences, write books, and email their peers.
People publish in journals because HR believes the number of papers, citations, and journal impact numbers are proxies for excellence.
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What you don't understand is that academic careers are based on what you can publish in a peer-reviewed journal. If you don't publish in the journals (or something equivalent), you won't be hired, you won't be promoted, your work doesn't become part of the literature. It doesn't exist for any practical purposes.
Slashdot is really clueless on this one (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to work in the academia so I know what I am talking about.
1. The signatories on this boycott are the big names in machine learning. Many of them are respectable people who spent time and efforts peer-reviewing papers (if you ask me, a f-cking thankless job). I are not talking small-time researchers who, like me, could never get a paper published in the ML venues with the most demanding criteria for acceptance. These signatories are the math wizards.
2. Publishers, on the other hand, make use of our labor and our efforts. They exhort away the authors' copyrights, and offer in return nothing but mere kilobytes of disk space on their websites. Conference organizers pay them (in particular, Springer) to print their proceedings, and they keep increasing the price year after year, forcing many good conferences to ultimately go for other, less "prestigious" venues.
3. About a decade back, the ML field fended off one of the most courageous boycott on one prestigious journal, and established a new journal called JMLR -- which, through their painstaking efforts, eventually gained the same prestige and recognition. It's a victory for the people with guts.
4. Nature is a place for publishing mostly biological findings. (There is the occasional physics and CS article, but that's the exception rather than the norm.) However, due to the high citation rates and impact to the society (because medicine) they have come to be regarded as THE most prestigious journal in the world. Many universities are ranked by how many papers they publish in Nature, thus disadvantaging anyone who is not a biologist, or not working in medicine. Math people especially are disadvantaged.
5. In recent years, Nature banked on their "prestige" to publish many sub-journals under their Nature brand. These Nature-brand journals eventually come to rank way lower than even non-Nature journals, as even the biologists start to realize that they are not really up to the standard.
The recent incident is just another one of Nature's venture into this "business".
As far as I am concerned, the ML people are perfectly justified in their boycott. I would've done more.
Not just a problem with nature (Score:2)
Researcher here.
This is not just a problem with Nature. It's a sickness with every for-profit journal. Many examples show that with a bit of technology, it's cheap and easy to cut out the publisher. They pretty much do nothing but host content. Editors, reviewers, and writers are all academics that pretty much get nothing and the publishers pull in exorbitant fees.
The prestige isn't really about Nature, either. It's more connected to senior researchers in the field who have most of the power in academia to
But not because of the ridiculous name? (Score:2)