Statement on Nature Machine Intelligence

I think (correct me if I am wrong) machine learning (and a lot of other fields within CS) is the first field that has completely shattered the closed journal type system in Academia. I work in an interdisciplinary field with an ML focus, and many non-ML faculty and collaborators are just so surprised hearing how the machine learning community generally approaches publications.<p>There is no need whatsoever for the ML field to go back. I also feel the cat is out of the bag for ML, and there is no turning back into a system that Nature promotes even if they are trying to.

There are already big names in this list and it was a a tenth (~30) only a few hours ago when I signed. Yoshua Bengio, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, ... Even if it only represents their personal opinion, like herd immunity I&#x27;m certain this will prevent widespread adoption.<p>When I started in NLP as an undergrad, almost all the papers I cared about were free to read from the ACL Anthology. As I shifted into broader machine learning, arXiv became my new home. Nature&#x27;s closed Machine Intelligence would be a step back. I am glad that researchers and scientists want to keep research open and accessible.<p>P.S. It&#x27;s already weird that Nature has DeepMind papers. At least in that case DeepMind have a formalized agreement &#x2F; enough clout that they can host the paper themselves but even the hint of ambiguity can kill knowledge propagation at many institutions. An example would be &quot;Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge&quot;[0] &#x2F; &quot;Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search&quot;[1].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepmind.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;119&#x2F;agz_unformatted_nature.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepmind.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;119&#x2F;agz_unformatted_nature.pd...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;deepmind-media&#x2F;alphago&#x2F;AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;deepmind-media&#x2F;alphago&#x2F;AlphaG...</a>

Nature Machine Intelligence responded:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natmachintell&#x2F;status&#x2F;990503910673715200?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natmachintell&#x2F;status&#x2F;990503910673715200?...</a>

Some big names signed there. Sounds like a death sentence for this journal, despite the prestigious pedigree. Either it will wither or become a second-rate trashcan.