Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941
Academics share machine-learning research freely. Taxpayers should not have to pay twice to read our findings
[...] In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of Gauss’s pioneering work, modern data are no longer just planetary observations but medical images, spoken language, internet documents and more. The results are medical diagnoses, recommender systems, and whether driverless cars see stop signs or not. Machine learning is the field that underpins the current revolution in artificial intelligence.
Machine learning is a young and technologically astute field. It does not have the historical traditions of other fields and its academics have seen no need for the closed-access publishing model. The community itself created, collated, and reviewed the research it carried out. We used the internet to create new journals that were freely available and made no charge to authors. The era of subscriptions and leatherbound volumes seemed to be behind us.
The public already pays taxes that fund our research. Why should people have to pay again to read the results? Colleagues in less well-funded universities also benefit. Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, has as much access to the leading machine-learning research as Harvard or MIT. The ability to pay no longer determines the ability to play.
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.
[...] 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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Wednesday May 30 2018, @10:44PM (22 children)
Anything else to say?
Perhaps some polite applause?
Pay to view journals with their often bs broken anonymous peer review systems need to die a fast death.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @11:04PM (11 children)
If only we had a global network of computers, and a myriad of software packages and protocols for exchanging data.
One day. One day.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 30 2018, @11:11PM (10 children)
The added value of the Journal model was supposed to be the peer reviews, saving you the time it takes to weed out the crummy research (and fakers) and get access to the good stuff.
Of course, that requires the Journals to do that part correctly, lest their "science" end up at the level of the Twitter feed of a Republican Congresscritter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @11:20PM (9 children)
People can read and sign off on papers.
If there's any virtue in anonymity, then the University's can set up a consortium that will sign publicly anonymous peer-reviewer keys as vouchers for expertise.
Otherwise, anyone can sign a paper, and thereby build trust among his web of buddies.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 30 2018, @11:54PM (8 children)
Mmmm... I don't think signing is a problem, especially when the signing party is A/C.
Me thinks there are two requirements that need to be fulfilled before signing: independent and review.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday May 31 2018, @12:21AM (7 children)
You can't necessarily trust that a journal has "independent review", especially if they don't publish reviewer names and comments.
With AC's proposal, you just throw your paper out there and it can be attacked by academics or anybody else. You can give less weight to the anonymous reviewers, but still collect their analyses of the research nonetheless.
Journals already publish in-depth responses/comments to journal articles, so AC's idea is partially implemented in the real world:
Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale [sciencemag.org] (DOI: 10.1126/science.aam5678) (DX [doi.org])
Comment on “Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale” [sciencemag.org] (open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aar2435) (DX [doi.org])
Response to Comment on “Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale” [sciencemag.org] (open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aar3824) (DX [doi.org])
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:17AM (6 children)
Signature by itself alone this doesn't guarantees independence. And neither does guarantees pertinent reviewing.
And you have a warranty that you won't be flooded with "stellar reviews" by paid-for-reviewers? I mean, look at Yelp and others.
Do you want feedback coming for people on the "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" position?
Just to be clear in what I'm saying:
1. signing (cryptographic or in any other way) is very likely a necessary part of the "independent review" process. But it alone is not sufficient.
2. far from my minds to say that the way the journals handle it is the best solution. The only warranty they offer is a weakish one: they stake their reputation they better make good if they want to stay in business. But any other better solution will still need to answer to the independent and pertinent review. Which the comment I was replying to does not mention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:23AM (5 children)
You are willfully ignoring part of the OP's point, and therefore you are engaged in a straw man argument.
The comment to which you were replying mentioned webs of trust.
Whether the reviewing was independent, or whether there was reviewing at all is a probability to be calculated by each interested party; such a calculation is based on the interested party's web of trust.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 31 2018, @08:44AM (4 children)
Ah, ignorance! What a blissful life you are living, A/C.
Web-of-trust [wikipedia.org] guarantees that a signing key really corresponds to a a certain person identity. So, it answers to the identity problem and that's about how far it goes.
It does not guarantee out-of-band communication (so that the reviews may be "arranged" instead of fair), it doesn't even cover the pertinence of the reviews (i.e. the reviewer is qualified to offer an relevant opinion about the matter), it doesn't even cover the effort of assessing the relevance of the received reviews (from a possible flood of irrelevant ones).
"For every complex problem, there is solution that is clear, simple and wrong" - in this case, digital signature alone (with or without Web-of-trust).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:01PM (3 children)
Part of maintaining one's web of trust is re-calculating whether an individual should be kept in that web of trust.
In this case, that's a matter of comparing one's expectation of independence/expertise with actual results.
In other words, the reviews are also subject to reviews; it's reviews all the way down UNTIL someone decides that enough reviewing has been done and just accepts a certain web of trust. It's an ongoing, iterative process.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:47PM (2 children)
Seems to me you are associating a lot more meaning to Web of trust [wikipedia.org] than the rest of the world familiar with the term.
As such, I find you "willfully missing the point" accusation ill-founded: I can't wilfully miss a point nobody else but you knows about.
This looks like vetting the fitness of someone to a purpose (in particular, the reviewing purpose). Has nothing to do with the common meaning of "web of trust" - I'll be grateful if you use different name for the construct that you have in mind if you'd be inclined to explain.
If you want to go on the path of explaining/detailing your proposal, I'd suggest you to consult the Byzantine fault tolerance [wikipedia.org] in addressing the weakness I seem to detect what you propose on the line of "gaining trust until vetted, misbehaving later". Also, the role of anonymity in lending credence to the independence trait the review process requires (what to do with the case in many reviewers favour or disfavour a certain author or group of them [soylentnews.org])
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:28PM
You download software and check to make sure that at least Joe Dev has signed it, because you trust that he is producing high quality software.
Yet, you start to notice that a few glaring bugs have been slipping through, and so you start to have doubts about Joe Dev; maybe, he's having marital troubles, and just isn't devoting as much time to the project as he used to do. So, you decide that you don't really trust him all that much anymore, and therefore remove him from your Web of Trust.
Next time you download an update, your signature-verification software warns: Nobody in your Web of Trust has signed this software; well, now you know that you need to do a little more investigation of your own—either you need to check the changes that have been made, or you need to find someone else whom you can trust to do so.
To borrow a phrase, GET IT YET MUTHAFUCKA?!!!1111
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:31PM
An expert registers in the flesh with a consortium of Universities, presenting all the usual Old World criteria (e.g., an expensive piece of paper); the expert generates a one-time private-key for reviewing some article, and then asks the consortium to sign his public key, indicating to the world that his public key has been verified to be that of an expert.
The rest of the world doesn't know how this expert is, but because they trust the consortium and its long history of success, they also accept reviews by that fairly anonymous expert.
Come on. COME ON!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @11:17PM
Pay to view journals are not de wey.
Ok I'm a tard.
ICCF Holland link [iccf-holland.org] to atone for my racist sins. What have Emacs users done for Uganda lately?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by unauthorized on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:08AM (7 children)
Come on, that's not a reasonable assessment. Mainstream pay-per-view journals are pretty good at weeding out bullshit, the quality is leagues above free journals and pay2play journals. Sure, occasionally you'll get a weak article published, but I'm yet to see those journals publish troll papers (see this for example [skeptic.com]).
I'm all for transitioning to open journals, but right now traditional publications is the best thing we have. Even when we replace them with something better one day, their historic value will not be diminished - these journals contributed a lot to humanity and for that they deserve to be cherished, even as they become outdated in the march of progress.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:04AM (5 children)
They absolutely do NOT deserve to be "cherished." Many of them once served the greater good but have been co-opted by giant corporate conglomerates that seek outrageous profits for doing next to nothing.
The work is primarily done by editorial boards and peer reviewers, most of whom are academics who work for free. The logistics of copyediting, formatting, and other basic publication matters can often be done for a fraction of the cost of mainstream journals. Publishers exploit the labor of highly skilled academics and play off their past reputations of journals, but the cycle can be broken.
Rather than "cherishing" co-opted corporate monstrosities just because they share a journal name with something that used to be for the greater good, we should encourage those big name academics to take their work and reputation elsewhere, to declare independence [simmons.edu] from the corporations that leech off their work, and found open-access journals that can do the same work for significantly less cost and make research available to all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by unauthorized on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:48AM (4 children)
If you can't value something despite it's flaws, then you can never value anything because nothing is perfect. There are many wrongs with today's journals, but many of those wrongs are endemic in mainstream western civilization, rather than being specific to the journals. Do you think we should stop valuing culture because corporations like Disney have de facto usurped it? Should we no longer consider the Internet a great thing just because Google's grubby fingers are everywhere and you can't even as much as look up a web page without having to install a mandatory buttplug.js?
Journals still work and provide value, despite being parasitized by talentless leeches. I can't see a good reason why this is not worthy of appreciation.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:50PM (2 children)
I truly don't understand your point here. I am not arguing and did not argue against journals, only against profiteering journals. As pointed out in discussion below, there are plenty of claimed "open-access" journals that exist as profiteering enterprises too, if not outright scams. I don't value those "journals" either.
And I'm not at all trying to take away from the historical value of historical issues of classic journals. But if said journals have been bought out by a publisher that is now charging ridiculous subscription rates, why should good academics waste their voluntary time being on editorial boards and doing peer review when they could be using their time for journals that don't have the "middleman" skimming large profits off the top?
In a given academic discipline and definitely within an academic subdiscipline, everybody knows the "good" journals -- the ones that have good peer review processes and publish quality research. Everyone knows the relative "pecking order." How do journals get those reputations? By having good academic editors and good editorial boards that run a quality academic enterprise that sifts out the better research from the crap to publish a quality journal. Journal reputations can go up and down over time depending on standards of those who run it -- again, almost always VOLUNTEERING their time.
Those are the people who make the reputation of the journal. Those are the people who maintain it and make it a positive contribution to science. So why should they (or peer reviewers or authors who want to publish) continue to support such an enterprise if it's become infected by profiteering corporate bureaucracy that adds NOTHING to the scientific quality??
Let them do as I say and migrate to a journal with more responsible policies. Because without the editorial board, you know what a journal is? A name. That's it. It has no legitimacy beyond the academics who maintain it. The companies that are making money off of this stuff are simply leeches -- let them have the name, and let the better academics migrate to found new names and create new reputations for better journals in the long-run.
(Score: 1) by unauthorized on Friday June 01 2018, @12:13AM (1 child)
I think I see the point of disagreement clearly now, I myself tend see journals as a holistic institution (ie yhe reviewers are ARE the journal), and you only see them as the discrete publishing entity. Or to put it in other words, it's like the difference of seeing a nation as it's citizenry, rather than purely as the state itself.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 01 2018, @04:04AM
Okay, I understand that perspective. But note the link I gave in my first reply to you: it was about editorial boards leaving extant journals en masse and forming new journals often with better access and less unnecessary corporate bureaucracy.
That's what I'm advocating for... Effectively preserving extant scholarly communities but migrating the people to better platforms. I don't see the point in continuing to support existing corporate journal infrastructure if they are not responsive to the demands of the academics who run them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:06PM
you're just another apologist whore. fuck you and your precious information prisons.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:47AM
The are not bad at weeding out bullshit, but that is not what they claim, they claim they are providing some kind of factual validation.
Unfortunately the fact, which a number of researchers I know see regularly, is the journals are often so specific, a small around of experts at the top
of the field end up reviewing each others work almost all the time, and it becomes a mixture of horse trading and 'a quick chat on the phone, yes, of course I will!'
Hardly what the public thinks of as peer review..
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:57AM
Yes, there is: Get me off your fucking mailing list [vox.com].
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Wednesday May 30 2018, @10:47PM
Why would they want to put research on something Artificial into something called Nature. Seriously, how much real stupid do you have to be to not figure that one out? Duh.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:10AM (9 children)
In order to get someone to pay for something that they have been receiving for free, one of two things needs to happen:
From what I can gather, the new journal offers nothing that isn't already available through this community's existing channels, and those channels aren't going anywhere.
I don't think a boycott is necessary - it sounds like "the market will decide for itself"
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:16AM (7 children)
By making their opposition explicit, they can convince other researchers not to publish in it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:53AM (6 children)
True, but they also sound like virtue-signalling whiners when they do it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:30AM
What something sounds like is quite subjective. Maybe this is case where the problem stems from the listener, rather than the speakers?
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:11AM (4 children)
Only if you understand nothing about scientific publishing and the fact that the cost of many journals is outrageous these days and controlled by a few profit-driven companies.
If you realize all that and that it's possible for academics to band together like they already do and be an editorial board for a journal with more open policies, it makes perfect sense to point out to the profiteering of mainstream journals and encourage others to find better avenues to share research.
(Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:59PM (2 children)
No I think Mykl has something of a point. There does appear to be an issue with the open access movement with respect to acknowledging the problem of predatory journals:
https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.029 [doi.org]
Ultimately open access or something similar is the way publishing of research, particularly publicly funded research, needs to go. However solutions to problems such as this need to be found. Unfortunately (if Beall is to be believed) the open access movement seems to have adopted some of the "neo-marxist" approach to advocacy, including virtue signalling and so forth, which makes dealing with the problems of open access publishing more difficult.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:30PM (1 child)
Huh? Sorry, but do you know anything about academic publishing? You do realize there are plenty of closed-access predatory journals and publishers too, right? The author of that article in your link obviously doesn't acknowledge that this was an issue long before the internet too. There were always publishers willing to take your money to effectively allow you to self-publish.
And there are still lots of journals and publishers out there who will take your money. This is not specific to the open-access movement. Yes, it is a problem, but it hasn't been caused by open access... it's just predatory people in general.
I'll agree with you that there is a difference in that many open-access journals have to charge some fees, so it can be difficult for IDIOTS to figure out which journals are reputable and which are not. I get spammed by dozens of crappy journals and publishers every week. I know they're spam. I know they're crap. If I couldn't publish in a legitimate journal with a known reputation, I wouldn't pay one of those scammers.
You're basically saying that some people with graduate degrees can't figure out that they shouldn't listen to the equivalent of Nigerian scammer emails.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. Open access means simply that research is available to all. That's it. If that's "neo-Marxist" to advocate for such a thing, then I guess science is fundamentally "neo-Marxist," since the entire foundation of modern science was laid in the 17th century through societies and scholars who SHARED scientific results.
(Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Friday June 01 2018, @09:28AM
I don't claim to be an expert and I thought that was pretty clear in how I wrote my comment but, really, it was in no way a comment someone would make with no knowledge of academic publishing! You have also managed to completely misunderstand the point I was making - I was not saying that open access is "Neo-Marxist" (and in fact stated I was generally in support of the idea), I was using that to describe the tactics used by supporters of open access as described by Beall and linking that to the the post you were replying to. I've not experience that myself - until now I guess.
To address your other points:
1. Predatory publishing in this context refers to the behaviour of some open access journals/publishers specifically. Whist other dubious publishing practices exist the driver in this case is the charging of fees to publish.
2. The majority of open access journals use the gold model which is fees changed to publish*
3. Good for you that you can identify the scammers, but obviously some do publish, higher degrees do not automatically make one immune.
* data a few years old and from memory only.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:29PM
This post is brought to you by the number 927 - if that means nothing you you, have a wooooosh.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:27AM
Nature is a big name in scientific publishing and their journals have a high impact factor. Anything that takes the wind out of their sails is a good thing. Academic publishing is not a rational market. Prestige begets prestige, and Nature is like a monarchy that taxes people as a birthright.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:23AM
Also, professional societies are very much out of step on this matter. The ACM and IEEE maintain digital libraries on their own systems, rather than disseminate the research therein to public and university libraries, as they know all too well they could easily do. Especially as they have insisted that authors turn over all copyright to them, asked for more rights than was necessary, just so they need not fear being sued for infringement under any circumstances. But they weren't supposed to do this, not this lockdown. It's total hoarding, what they do. Keeping their collections so close empowers them to gouge for access, and they do. To access the ACM's collection, if you are not affiliated with a university, you have to become a member for $100 per year, and pay an additional $100 per year for library access. Cheaper than paying $30 per paper if you look at more than 6 in a year, but that's about all that can be said for the system.
I could maybe understand a society of professional artists not getting it, but those two are the professional societies for Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, arguably the professions deepest into technology. If any group is composed of members that ought to understand the implications, it's them. I mean, freaking Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, was president of the ACM, and under him the terms for access to ACM digital library did not change at all. Aaron Swartz seems to be one of the few who got it.
I can also understand the need to recoup costs. But I have never seen any promise that the ACM or IEEE will release their libraries once they have recouped costs. The most they do is say the money is plowed back into enhancing the library. Uh, huh. Yeah, sure, digitize every issue of their monthly publication, and all the papers in all their journals from before they went all digital, which should have been no later than the 1990s, but it took a while to dethrone King Paper. Wonder how much of the fees are wasted on overhead, for fat pay packages for the management.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:46AM
In physics at least a number of open access journals are gaining ground. There is New Journal of Physics, PRX, Optics Express. Closed journals with similar impact factor will lose prestige, because researchers value open access. Even if it's just because they are away from their institutional network, and don't want to be arsed with VPN logins to read a paper. Eventually, scientific societies will realize that journals will no longer be the profit center that funds their other activities. And for-profit publishers are going to lose revenue.