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.
see: https://science.slashdot.org/s...
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.