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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: 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!