Slashdot Mirror
Why Thousands of AI Researchers Are Boycotting the New Nature Journal (theguardian.com)
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.
It's not thousands, one guy merely made a bot that emulated thousands of researchers.
Table-ized A.I.
see: https://science.slashdot.org/s...
Oh boo hoo. Nothing is stopping researchers from uploading their papers on arXiv either before or after acceptance at this journal.
I found the new journal highly useful. I published a study on lubricants and oscillating systems. Nature Buttsecks was the perfect journal for my work
They gouge the academic market with overpriced merchandise. They pay professors to specify Springer textbooks for their classes. Some Springer textbooks are over 60 years old and the original author long dead. No matter. Springer will still charge you the $200.
The irony is that there are so many free textbooks, and textbooks out of copyright that are available and written by experts in their field which never get specified by professors. Hmmm. Wonder why?
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.
...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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Who is 'us' in this case? Machine learning is not exactly a new field and people have been publishing research in commercial and peer reviewed journals for decades. While I know it is a really lucrative field, younger ML people seem to be really obsessed with ignoring all that came before them, including their own field.
Same can be said about any research field... The journals job is the same in all of them, merely distribute the content. In any field the journalay or may not employee its own reviewers and there are plenty of examples where complete nonsense was published in journals of both kinds (with and without its own reviewers) because it depends on the quality of the individuals involved and their motivations and priorities.
What we need is an open endorsement system where individuals can publish their +1 or comments at any time when they read a paper, not just when it is first published.
The academic community is a total walled garden. Having an unknown get a paper published is about as likely as someone getting elected to congress without the backing of a political party. It's technically possible, but never happens. The senior faculty have a hegemony on what gets published, who gets credit, who gets funding, and who's ideas are allowed to surface.
A privately run (for-profit) journal threatens that model by giving researchers the ability to publish external to that control, it's not surprising that the response is to make 3,000 researchers sign a non-compete pledging that they'll never work for the competition. I imagine if someone doesn't sign up, suddenly their funding dries up, that professorship is no longer available, and so forth.
... the paying audience defines the value of content.
For reference, see Fox News, CNN.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Great, Machine Learning is being brought to us by a bunch of broke azz communists to cheap to spend to upgrade coverage on their intellectual passion. What could go wrong?
So make your own open access AI journal. With blockchain tokens gained by crowdsourced review and edits effort voted on by others in a self-curating quality-optimising information ecosystem. And hookers.
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.
is that something to do with Jerry Springer ?
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
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Don't forget fuzzy logic.
Also theorem proving machines (proving all possible theorems), formal logic, and cybernetics.
Semantic nets, svms, ... the list goes on.
Since AI isjust software, and not 'intelligence', it doesn't really matter. PC world, Nature Journal, six and a half dozen. Some of you engineers are sure impressed with yourselves.
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.
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 make career advancement decisions. Unfortunately, a lot of them like the idea of a journal like Nature, and so the cycle continues.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Do I need to detail the oxymoronicisity of "Nature Machine Intelligence"? Two of those words don't belong together.
The problem with the "with a bit of technology" argument is the technology has been around for decades to do so, and yet only recently and in limited quantities has there been any kind of change. I'm not even sure the whole "they're too powerful" argument holds much water when one considers just how many different fields there are to hold a particular pattern of behavior to. Maybe the more logical conclusion that much like maligned "management", journals do serve a useful purpose.