Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal

Some heavy hitters on the signatory list: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Volodymyr Mnih, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine.<p>Would like to see Demis Hassabis and David Silver join the effort.<p>If Deepmind, OpenAI and Berkeley (well represented here) all boycott, that&#x27;s a huge chunk of key AI researchers.

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 of the status quo keep it so entrenched?

Everytime something like this comes up I feel compelled to remind everyone that in most cases I know of (NSF and NIH funded research) US taxpayer funded research must be made freely available. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;publicaccess.nih.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;publicaccess.nih.gov&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.research.gov&#x2F;research-portal&#x2F;appmanager&#x2F;base&#x2F;desktop?_nfpb=true&amp;_pageLabel=research_node_display&amp;_nodePath=&#x2F;researchGov&#x2F;Service&#x2F;Desktop&#x2F;AboutPublicAccess.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.research.gov&#x2F;research-portal&#x2F;appmanager&#x2F;base&#x2F;des...</a> .<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I think the current publishing model is archiac, exploitative, and needs to change, but this whole &quot;taxpayer funded research should be freely available argument&quot; seems to me to oversimplify the issue and ignore the facts.

Legality aside, has there ever been an instance of a researcher getting a DMCA notice for posting a paper they wrote on their own website?<p>Even if you got a DMCA, couldn&#x27;t you just direct link to a scihub search result that contains your paper?<p>Edit: I love it when I find my work on scihub. It means it was good enough to &#x27;steal&#x27;.

Former scientist here, too. People tend to forget what value a Nature article carries for the successful career in academia. The technical “hosting” of Nature and Arxiv might be the same, but the first will buy a lot of fame and potentially a good position at an research institute.

One thing I really wonder is wheather those costs are actually necessary for simple online publications:<p>- Peer review is basically &quot;free&quot;, meaning it&#x27;s done by volunteers without compensation.<p>- Hosting cost is magnitudes lower than publication&#x2F;reading fees. A few dollars per paper should be enough by far.<p>- Organisation of peer reviewing, editing and so on imposes some costs, but a lot of it could be automated and the remaining cost per published paper should still be quite low.<p>So, would it be technically possible to create such journals? Of course, prestige might be a hurdle, but given some high-profile researchers would join as editors initially, that could work out.

Journal reviewing is oversold in my opinion. Just like Wikipedia became a better encyclopedia than traditional encyclopedias, I don&#x27;t see why open-access approaches can&#x27;t be at least as efficient at truth-seeking and consesus-building than traditional journals.

A bit off topic but have research journals become a whipping boy for the anti-science crowd? The general public is being spoon fed either very poor quality click-bait &quot;break through&#x2F;cure cancer&quot; articles or worse. Recently the peer-reviewed != reproducible issue was highlighted. I feel there is a common thread but it could my commonality bias of an HN reader. Is attacking science journals a new trend?

May be these journals should move away from publishing and rather be in the business of curation from a source such as arxiv; Arxiv has a wealth of content, may be journals could sift through them and produce periodic curated lists of work that is the most significant.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aaron_Swartz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aaron_Swartz</a><p>&quot;setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT&quot;<p>INFORMATION IS FREE:<p>&quot;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.&quot;

It&#x27;s really strange to me that in 2018, with open web and were we are publishing massive codebases on github that folks are still going through a paid&#x2F;closed publisher to get published.

I found some blockchain project teams trying to solve the problems in scholarship communication. Pluto(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluto.network" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluto.network</a>) is non-profit organization and trying to make standard academic data for free. Check out this video with English subtitle. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;IKqUhJZN6Zg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;IKqUhJZN6Zg</a>). And also there is scienceroot project(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scienceroot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scienceroot.com</a>) and Orvium. If you wnat to see the details, check this post. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;mapping-the-blockchain-for-science-landscape-546b61bfbd1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;mapping-the-blockchain-for-science-la...</a>)

While we are on the topic, why are we supporting IEEE? They have so many valuable as well as historical papers behind their paywall. I&#x27;m IEEE member and want to find out what can I do about this.

Nature used to be a prestigious journal. But its spinoffs, not so much. When they stuck to bio, they were good. Computer science, not so good. Nature Energy&#x27;s hype pieces from flaky battery inventors have been mentioned on HN.

ArXiv forever!

Journals are based on prestige; researchers give their work for free to a publisher where it is reviewed by other researchers (usually for free) and then published such that other researchers must pay to get the work. It does create a well respected system since publishers want only quality work but the arrangement has become more and more one sided favoring the publishers.<p>TL;DR This isn&#x27;t that surprising. The cost of publishing is lower than ever and researchers are tired of getting charged for what they give away for free.

I have a thought... Force car owners, business or consumer, to buy driverless car insurance. No insurance, no autonomous vehicle functionality. Insurance companies would love a new market opportunity, and they&#x27;d lead the push to make driverless cars safe enough to insure.

Honestly, they should just flip the journal funding model on its head. Instead of readers paying for subscriptions, publishing institutions can pay for publication rights. In fact, they could probably take all the subscription money they get from institutions and change nothing but the name (something like &quot;authorship fee&quot;, &quot;membership fee&quot; or &quot;institutional publication service fee&quot; or whatever). make the journals open access and not feel any change at all in revenue.<p>Besides, if you look at the money, fancy journals are responsible for a lot of funding that ends up in the coffers of researchers or the institutions that support them, so it really wouldn&#x27;t be crazy. I read somewhere that a Science&#x2F;Nature paper in some fields is thought to be worth &gt;$1mm in funding.

Wonder if we are repeating the sentiment from 1958: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17184576" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17184576</a>

What&#x27;s the point of journals these days, especially in computing with reproducible results (i.e. authors publish a paper on arxiv, code &amp; dataset on github)?

What is the alternative here - there doesnt seem to be one.<p>Is there a open, <i>free</i>, peer-reviewed&#x2F;crowd-reviewed journal paper website for artificial intelligence ?

Who runs Nature, why don&#x27;t you all hold the actual people personally responsible? Change in leadership.

Could ML&#x27;s open peer review practices be adopted by researchers in other fields?

the article is about this statement<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu&#x2F;home</a>

If people can post a pre-print to Arxiv then why is it a big deal if it also gets published in Nature Machine Intelligence? Sure a better formatted and edited version may be behind a paywall but anyone can find the original arxiv paper and get the important points.<p>edit: To make it clear, I&#x27;m talking about submitting to BOTH Arxiv, where it&#x27;s freely available, AND a paywalled journal like Nature.<p>edit 2: I get that we don&#x27;t want to waste, often government, money on mere distribution of research, but I also think researchers need a way to distinguish their work from the thousands of arxiv papers that get posted every year. Whether that&#x27;s through a Nature publication or something else is immaterial.

<i>&gt; In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of Gauss’s pioneering work, [...].</i><p>Yes, and I&#x27;m a descendand of Julius Caesar, Confucius and Charlemagne. I won&#x27;t tell you this when introducing myself though, because so is everybody else.<p>It wouldn&#x27;t have occured to me that AI researchers have such inferiority complexes that they need to descend to such name-dropping, but I guess I was wrong.