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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 30 2018, @10:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-stand dept.

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.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/29/why-thousands-of-ai-researchers-are-boycotting-the-new-nature-journal


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by unauthorized on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:48AM (4 children)

    by unauthorized (3776) on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:48AM (#686611)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:50PM (2 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday May 31 2018, @04:50PM (#686816) Journal

    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.

    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)

      by unauthorized (3776) on Friday June 01 2018, @12:13AM (#686996)

      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

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday June 01 2018, @04:04AM (#687074) Journal

        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

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:06PM (#686822)

    you're just another apologist whore. fuck you and your precious information prisons.