
Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal - HoppedUpMenace
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/29/why-thousands-of-ai-researchers-are-boycotting-the-new-nature-journal
======
mooneater
Some heavy hitters on the signatory list: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Volodymyr
Mnih, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine.

Would like to see Demis Hassabis and David Silver join the effort.

If Deepmind, OpenAI and Berkeley (well represented here) all boycott, that's a
huge chunk of key AI researchers.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Deepmind puts everything on ArXiv already.

~~~
mooneater
they are not mutually exclusive. nature allows for preprints on arxiv
according to wikipedia.

------
skywhopper
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?

~~~
yread
Universities could be in conflict of interest - organizing review of competing
(or worse its own) research

~~~
apetresc
Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would
presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?

~~~
cli
The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due
to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

~~~
njarboe
It is not blind for most science fields (I was not aware of any that were
blind before reading this. PhD in Earth Science). What fields do you know of
where journals send out papers for review with the author and his/her
affiliation removed?

~~~
jpeanuts
I've seen it exactly once (in a numerical analysis journal). Authors were
blacked out. This was undermined almost immediately when the authors wrote in
the introduction "... following previous work of the present authors [1]...".

Even if all these clues could be effectively removed, the nature of the
research work, tools used, writing style, all unambiguously indicate
authorship to someone in the field. I think for this reason double-blind
review is not popular.

Which is not to say that it would be great if it were possible...

------
stilley2
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
[https://publicaccess.nih.gov/](https://publicaccess.nih.gov/) and
[https://www.research.gov/research-
portal/appmanager/base/des...](https://www.research.gov/research-
portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=research_node_display&_nodePath=/researchGov/Service/Desktop/AboutPublicAccess.html)
.

Don't get me wrong, I think the current publishing model is archiac,
exploitative, and needs to change, but this whole "taxpayer funded research
should be freely available argument" seems to me to oversimplify the issue and
ignore the facts.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Are you claiming that most research is already freely available and yet
everyone is, for some unspecified reason, still paying publishers for an
extraneous service?

The NIH site links right to PubMed Central from which it seems like it'd be
'easy' to find a paper for which I know the title. None of the pages on the
NSF site ever seemed to be intended for someone that's not _contributing_ to
the 'public access repository'.

Would you demonstrate your claim and provide a link, for an article published
in Nature, to the same freely available version that "must be made"?

It seems pretty fantastic that libraries would spend taxpayer money for access
to journals containing papers that are already freely available. I'm very
confused why that would be.

~~~
gowld
Can you give an example of a publicly-funded paper that you _couldn 't_ find
on PubMed or another server, but a Nature or another closed journal offers for
sale?

~~~
nonbel
Sure, go to Nature Medicine:
[https://www.nature.com/nm/](https://www.nature.com/nm/)

Click the first research article they show. It has various public funding
sources:

 _" The collection of the ELC and genetic data for the American samples was
supported by direct funding from the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH
to the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch (D.R.W., PI, protocol 95-M-0150,
NCT00001486, annual report number: ZIA MH002942-05), with supplemental
analytic support from the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Branch
(K.F.B., PI). G.U. received partial support from P50MH094268."_
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0021-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0021-y)

Check that other site:
[https://par.nsf.gov/search/term:%22Convergence%20of%20placen...](https://par.nsf.gov/search/term:%22Convergence%20of%20placenta%20biology%20and%20genetic%20risk%20for%20schizophrenia%22)

~~~
nonbel
And here is the pubmed link (only abstract available):
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29808008](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29808008)

------
danmg
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?

Even if you got a DMCA, couldn't you just direct link to a scihub search
result that contains your paper?

Edit: I love it when I find my work on scihub. It means it was good enough to
'steal'.

~~~
alexschiller
The American Psychological Association tried and they quickly backtracked
after blowback: [https://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670...](https://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670/title/Authors-Peeved-by-APA-s-
Article-Takedown-Pilot/)

------
baxtr
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.

~~~
pedrocr
No one forgets that. Everyone just thinks we should solve the chicken-and-egg
problem and move that prestige to a set of journals that don't gouge everyone
for research that was mostly paid for by public money already and was peer-
reviewed by public employees volunteering.

~~~
baxtr
Well, then you have to come up with a good idea how to change the nature of
humans. We thrive on fame as social status currency

Not just in science. The equivalent in startups might be a famous VC or
whatever. It’s about attaching yourself to a brand.

~~~
Barrin92
this has nothing to do with some mystical 'nature of humans', we're just stuck
in a bad nash equilibrium.

Journals thrive on reputation and nobody can individually dissent because they
lose out. This is the same mechanism that keeps overpriced tuition fees at ivy
league colleges afloat.

The answer is to collectively get out by legislating the practice or offering
a free public alternative that everybody can immediately jump too. Given that
the efforts become more and more organised, (German wholesale boycott of
Elsevier) this might be happening sooner than later.

~~~
nunya213
But Arxiv has been around for years and the Journals haven't died yet.

~~~
Barrin92
Just offering a superior platform is not enough, as said in the last post, you
also must create a way to collectively move everybody over and break the
feedback loop of prestige journals.

The same happens with social networks. You could offer the freest, most
privacy respecting network of all, as long as individuals get punished for
leaving the old one individually it'll never take over a significant amount of
market share, even _if everyone on the old network agrees that the newer one
is better_.

~~~
baxtr
Everybody would agree on this - in theory. But you don’t say _how_ this should
happen, and this is where it breaks down. The only thing that comes to mind is
“magic”...

~~~
jdietrich
... which is exactly our problem. Everyone (bar the publishers) hates the
status quo, but nobody knows how to break it. My personal hope is that sci-hub
will gradually erode the profitability of scientific publishing down to
nothing, but breaking the stranglehold of publishers will almost certainly be
a long and painful process.

[http://honisoit.com/2015/11/the-dictatorship-with-no-
dictato...](http://honisoit.com/2015/11/the-dictatorship-with-no-dictator/)

------
blauditore
One thing I really wonder is wheather those costs are actually necessary for
simple online publications:

\- Peer review is basically "free", meaning it's done by volunteers without
compensation.

\- Hosting cost is magnitudes lower than publication/reading fees. A few
dollars per paper should be enough by far.

\- 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.

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.

~~~
rlayton2
Prestige is a made up concept to keep the big players at the top. If the paper
is good then it shouldn't matter where it's published.

~~~
fwip
You've got it backwards though.

A paper isn't good because it's in Nature - it's in Nature because it's good.

~~~
rlayton2
I'm actually more concerned about the negative (your statement is mostly
true), i.e. "if it's in a second-tier journal, it doesn't exist". Sure, some
just look for an outlet for their crappy research, but the publication outlet
shouldn't be used as a shortcut to evaluating quality.

------
tokipin
Journal reviewing is oversold in my opinion. Just like Wikipedia became a
better encyclopedia than traditional encyclopedias, I don't see why open-
access approaches can't be at least as efficient at truth-seeking and
consesus-building than traditional journals.

~~~
c3534l
The whole idea behind journals is peer-review. That's very nearly a wikipedia-
style open access system anyway. There's just not a great reason to keep
chargind exhorbitant publishing fees when it's published online.

------
quizme2000
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 "break through/cure cancer" 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?

~~~
whatshisface
Supporting reproduction, complaining about public presentation of science, and
disliking the rent-seeking behaviors of journals are all pro-science positions
held more often by scientists than any other group.

~~~
quizme2000
Thank-you! I haven't talked to a research scientist in quite awhile. Its one
of the reasons I like HN's discussion about these types of issues.

------
billfruit
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.

~~~
Vinnl
Those journals do not really have an incentive to do that, do they?

------
stefek99
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

"setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR
using a guest user account issued to him by MIT"

INFORMATION IS FREE:

"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."

------
segmondy
It'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/closed publisher to get published.

~~~
fwip
While many eyes may make all bugs shallow; getting those eyes isn't free.

That is, the primary value-add of the traditional paper publishing model is
trust in the editorial staff and peer-reviewers. Anybody can throw up a repo
on github - not everyone can get that repo published in Nature. Journals
provide a curated list of exciting, valuable, and reliable research.

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

------
sytelus
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'm IEEE member
and want to find out what can I do about this.

~~~
akvadrako
Why are you an IEEE member? Can't you just be not.

~~~
gowld
That doesn't solve the problem of getting open access to IEEE published
papers.

~~~
akvadrako
They have DOI numbers, don't they? So you can just use sci-hub.

------
Animats
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's hype pieces from flaky battery inventors have been mentioned on HN.

------
nyxtom
ArXiv forever!

------
ClassAndBurn
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.

TL;DR This isn'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.

~~~
dwc
> the arrangement has become more and more one sided favoring the publishers

Rather than "has become" this is publishers using their leverage to achieve
this situation.

------
amorphid
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'd lead the push to
make driverless cars safe enough to insure.

------
a-dub
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 "authorship fee", "membership fee" or "institutional publication service
fee" or whatever). make the journals open access and not feel any change at
all in revenue.

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't be crazy. I read somewhere that a
Science/Nature paper in some fields is thought to be worth >$1mm in funding.

~~~
gowld
You just invented the open access publishing model.

[https://www.plos.org/publication-fees](https://www.plos.org/publication-fees)

It seems less profitable than the closed-access regime, since copyright is an
economically powerful tool.

~~~
a-dub
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the vast majority of NPG's revenue
comes from institutional subscriptions and that the vast majority of those
institutions make use of NPG's review/editorial process.

I guess there's less of a notion of the accumulation of valuable property in
the pay to publish regime.

But seriously, just call the subscriptions "membership fees." Revenue would
probably dip 5% from non-publisher subscriptions and things would stabilize.

It would also neutralize the threat of open access journals gaining more
ground.

------
sologoub
Wonder if we are repeating the sentiment from 1958:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184576)

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

~~~
nunya213
Reproducible results? lol. A fraction of researchers actually put out code and
data freely, definitely not a majority.

~~~
fourthark
And even when it's out, does the code actually run?

Designing your code and data so it's truly reproducible is a ton of work, and
most researchers are focused on the paper.

------
sandGorgon
What is the alternative here - there doesnt seem to be one.

Is there a open, _free_ , peer-reviewed/crowd-reviewed journal paper website
for artificial intelligence ?

------
Pywarrior
Who runs Nature, why don't you all hold the actual people personally
responsible? Change in leadership.

~~~
chrisseaton
How are you going to change the leadership of a company you don't own? What
are you planning we do? Get together and buy 51% of RELX? It's a $33 billion
company.

------
neolefty
Could ML's open peer review practices be adopted by researchers in other
fields?

~~~
cossatot
Copernicus Publications publishes a host of journals, many on the behalf of
non-profit scholarly and scientific societies [1]. For some or all of their
journals, including those by the European Geosciences Union, peer review is
open and there is a month-long public discussion forum for each manuscript.

I've got a paper in review with one of the journals right now, but several of
my colleagues have expressed caution with open peer review. I think a lot of
scientists are worried about making work public that _hasn 't_ been privately
vetted during peer review, and maybe being caught with an embarrassing
mistake.

[1]:
[https://publications.copernicus.org/](https://publications.copernicus.org/)

------
bedros
the article is about this statement

[https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/home](https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/home)

------
outlace
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.

edit: To make it clear, I'm talking about submitting to BOTH Arxiv, where it's
freely available, AND a paywalled journal like Nature.

edit 2: I get that we don'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's through a Nature publication or something else is
immaterial.

~~~
stanfordkid
Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society. If
"publishing in Nature" is no longer a credential for academics, then Nature
can't charge universities big bucks... that money can be spent by institutions
on other things (like funding GPU's to do more _actual_ machine learning
research)... so boycotting the journal is strictly a good thing.

~~~
cossatot
This is absolutely wrong. Academic journals provide value through scientific
aggregation, review, editorial curation, publication, archival curation, and
promotion.

Yes, you can bypass all of this and put your non-reviewed pdfs on your
personal website. No one will care, in part because _no one will even know_
and if they do, they have to do the hard work of review in order to decide
whether a paper is worth trusting. But how will anyone find out?

As an author, I've made a point never to publish in a paper not backed by a
non-profit scientific society with a decent open-access policy, after doing so
in the past. I also put all of my pdfs on my website including appropriate
white papers that are working drafts, making it clear to others that they
haven't been accepted through peer review.

As a reader, however, I keep up with the literature (aside from targeted
Google Scholar searches) through Table of Contents emails from a few journals
--mostly non-profit society journals but a few others including Nature. The
editorial curation aspects which limit the number of accepted papers per issue
make this possible. I'm not going to drink from the firehose of shit that is
produced each month, _especially_ before peer-review. Yeah, it sucks when your
paper is accepted by reviewers but gets nixed by the editors because it's not
cool enough, but... you know, get back to the bench and make it cooler if you
want people to care. Welcome to the 21st century and attention scarcity.

You can change the name 'Nature' to whatever open-access journal you'd like,
but the power behind it is that it's a sign that Important People have decided
your paper is one of the 10 most impactful papers in your field that year.
_That 's_ why people care.

~~~
stanfordkid
Maybe I should have stated it as "paid academic journals don't create any
marginal value for society vs. unpaid journals"

Nature is just a bunch of noted academics that come together and do peer-
review (for free btw)... is that enough value creation to charge exorbitant
amounts to universities and block content to the public that is funded by
government grants?

If academics could build a peer-review board themselves (hint: now they can...
thanks internet!) ... then everyone would have free access to science.

------
mbid
_> In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of
Gauss’s pioneering work, [...]._

Yes, and I'm a descendand of Julius Caesar, Confucius and Charlemagne. I won't
tell you this when introducing myself though, because so is everybody else.

It wouldn'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.

~~~
lccarrasco
I think he means that the field of ML has been built in part from Gauss's work
on algebra and statistics, not that the author is related to Gauss himself.

~~~
Jach
The criticism is along the lines of "Yeah basically all fields are academic
descendants of Gauss. Euler too." The article's aside is just odd, as is in
the first place bringing up Gauss (linking to another Guardian article, maybe
the real intent?) and an astronomer both paying another dude (some amount)
what sounds like club member fees for letter redistribution.

