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AI boffins rebel against closed-access academic journal that wants to have its cake and eat it
Thousands of machine-learning wizards have signed an open statement boycotting a new AI-focused academic journal, disapproving of the paper’s policy of closed-access. Nature Machine Intelligence is a specialized journal concentrating on intelligent systems and robotics research. It’s expected to launch in January next year, …
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 00:50 GMT ThatOne
Blood suckers
There is no cake here, only pure greed. Scientists are bound to publish, it's publish or perish, which is the reason there are a lot of vultures (unfortunately not Register-like ones) circling over them, trying to make money from every aspect of scientific publishing, requiring money both to publish and to access the published articles. The big loser is the scientist, who usually isn't really rolling in gold.
The best and only rational system would be a no-cost publishing service labs can access for free, being thus able to keep an eye on what is happening in their research domain. Unfortunately this doesn't create any profit, so it won't ever happen. On the contrary, the profiteers will keep tying down the market to make sure nobody can avoid paying them.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 03:27 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Blood suckers
Unfortunately this doesn't create any profit, so it won't ever happen
If only there were some public funded bodies that already employed the researchers who write, edit and review the papers?
Perhaps these universities and learned societies could go back to publishing their own journals - like they used to before the publishers convinced them that running their own presses was too difficult
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 07:06 GMT ARGO
Re: Blood suckers
>Perhaps these universities and learned societies could go back to publishing their own journals
Some of them still do. For example the Institute of Physics does all these: http://ioppublishing.org/publications/our-journals/
But even the journals owned by Institutes have to charge, and in most cases are expected to make a profit to subsidise the parent Institute's wider activities.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 11:01 GMT phuzz
Re: Blood suckers
"The best and only rational system would be a no-cost publishing service labs can access for free, being thus able to keep an eye on what is happening in their research domain. Unfortunately this doesn't create any profit, so it won't ever happen."
Nope, there's no chance of that ever happening. And by 'that' I mean people actually RTFA, not a free publishing service.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 21:47 GMT gizmo17
Re: Blood suckers
"The best and only rational system would be a no-cost publishing service labs can access for free, being thus able to keep an eye on what is happening in their research domain."
Right you are, and here's one celebrating its 25th birthday:
https://www.jair.org/index.php/jair
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 15:13 GMT LucreLout
Re: It's Like Burning Books
Aaron Swartz? He's the gutless wonder who who killed himself because he might have gone to prison.
Hardly Pankhurst or Ghandi.
I agree, he wasn't anything like either of those folks. Pankhurst orchestrated a bombing campaign - while I agree with her aims I cannot abide by her methods, however successfull they may have been. Ghandi wasn't above calling for enlistment to war, whatever his politics later developed into. Their great achievments will stand the test of time, but their actions prove that nobody is perfect.
Swartz was someones son, and he was hounded into an early grave for what? A few more dollars for the journal publishers that had minimal input on the work published, whose fees bear little resemblence to the cost of that publishing. Swartz was attempting, quite illegally and I fully understand why some of those whose papers he published would rightly be upset, to make available academic research papers such that all might learn from them and thus progress could be democratized and sped up.
As I said before, I don't agree with how he attempted to achieve his goal, but I do agree with his goal. And I certainly don't think being driven to his grave was a fair and reasonable punishment for his transgressions. I'm not suggesting his breaking the law should have gone unpunished, only that the punishment fit the crime - he made no personal gain from his endeavour, and he acted without malice - death, seems inappropriate punishment to me.
I've not downvoted you, but would encourage you to see room for a view that breach of copyright is not an offence worthy of taking a life, whomever enacts the finale.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 01:41 GMT YetAnotherJoeBlow
Research
I'll be the first to admit that without libgen, my whole career would have been a non-starter. Sincerely.
Most of the world doesn't realise the harm that these companies do - and there are a few. They stifle new research unless it comes with a pedigree. I've seen it happen and I've seen the results.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 02:31 GMT elDog
Re: Research
And even worse, they promote/demote/filter material that they don't want to appear.
While Nature is an esteemed publication, one has to wonder how it got that way. Was it because they had well-known and peer-evaluated reviewers looking at articles, or was it because they slowly clamped down and monetized what the publishers thought were best.
Whenever I see offshoots of well-known publications (The Times Review of Hip, or Nature - Homeopathy) then I start to think it is mainly about the money.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 08:17 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: [Nature] one has to wonder how it got that way.
I think it was always well regarded; but now there's an additional unholy feedback loop constructed by the interaction of job/promotion specifications (e.g. "papers in Nature or other high impact journals") and the publication strategies of researchers who have results of significant interest (well, even academics need a job, right?).
Since Nature is a commercial operation, you cannot really blame them for making the most of the situation. The real blame should be attributed to those who insist on simplistic measures of research success when making hiring/promotion decisions.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 09:25 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Research
"While Nature is an esteemed publication, one has to wonder how it got that way. Was it because they had well-known and peer-evaluated reviewers looking at articles, or was it because they slowly clamped down and monetized what the publishers thought were best."
It got that way by being very early into scientific publishing. If you couldn't get into Proc. Roy. Soc. you wanted to get into Nature although in my field New Phytol. or Proc. Roy. Ir. Acad. were pretty good.
However I do recall being told that just before I started out as a researcher that a journalist on Nature rung up my boss and my predecessor to check a report he'd written about someone else's paper and it was so bad that they more or less rewrote it for him over the phone.
It wasn't just refereeing that got farmed out, it was also proof-reading. Hot metal printing meant both galley and page proofs. For an author it was a chance to change your mind providing it wasn't a big change and fitted into exactly the same space as the text you'd changed. It was intended, however as means of picking up typos which really required a new set of eyes so the authors needed to rope in another academic colleague to assist in that.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 04:50 GMT A-nonCoward
weaklings, all and one, I say!
Hey, universities are funded by taxes and by making little kids get in debt for life. That's the way it has to be. Then, research is taken over by companies, as good Cthulhu made it be. Pharma, better seeds, chemistry.
Why should AI guys be free from the long reaching arm of greed? how unAmerican of them! Shame!
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 08:16 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Does Nature Publisinh Group (actually Springer?)....
... really need to edit another AI-specialized journal?
It's not as if quite a few good publications by ACM, IEEE and others already exist.
Here is a list of some interest, you can also select those that are open-access.
The debate on Open Access Publishing is not new and has been going on for more than a decade btw. Here is a blogpost from the physics community on this.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 22:43 GMT gizmo17
Re: Does Nature Publishing Group (actually Springer?)....
"The debate on Open Access Publishing is not new and has been going on for more than a decade btw."
A good deal longer than that, actually. JAIR will very shortly be celebrating its 25th anniversary issue. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it serves much the same community as this new offering appears to be targeting.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 09:38 GMT Doctor Syntax
The present commercial academic publishing model is surely one whose time has gone.
It's perfectly possible for an academic society to do all the editorial work needed. I was on the committee of one which did this. As our membership included all the staff of the local University department and the public sector body in the field there was no problem of recruiting well qualified people to do that. We did, however, have to carry the cost of typesetting and printing so although we sold copies to libraries etc. - at nothing like the current subscriptions - it was our major cost of running the society.
Now the typesetting and printing costs have gone the equivalent would be hosting costs and it would certainly be cheaper for libraries to get together and share those than continue to pour huge sums into the coffers of Elsevier.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 12:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
academic respectability
Elsevier sells a rag dedicated to alternative freak medicine - electromagnetic hypersensitivity, multiple chemical sensitivity, homeopathy, psychic fields, etc. All "rigorously peer reviewed" by fellow fruitloops. Yeah, academic respectability is just too important for AI to fall in with these ****s.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 12:50 GMT amanfromMars 1
The Devil you Know is in the Vulture Detailing
Do you realise there is leading cutting edge AI research shared freely here on El Reg, with some searching programs live running betatests/0day vulnerability exploits/project penetrations tests on both brand spanking new and prior analogous established legacy systems of administration/mass elite exclusive executive remote command and virtual control with media complicit with their reporting, or non reporting of developments in key powerful energy fields. ‽
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 13:08 GMT DCFusor
No fan of big science publishers
Who held back my initial work in beam collision nuclear fusion - by wanting nearly $60,000 for a subscription that would allow access to back issues of Rev Sci Ins - for one year. As "just a guy" who does science on his own dime (this is a field where that's do-able) - no way.
Luckily, I had a "Baker street dozen" to download the papers I needed from their Uni libraries and send me copies. Of course, not as good as being able to search and pick myself, but not all college kids are dumb.
A book I wrote long ago about Digital Audio Processing has been sold and resold without any discussion with me and is now owned by Elsevier. Don't buy it! (it's both out of date and overpriced, though it helped all the DAW people get their businesses going) All of the publishers who have owned it have lied about sales (one claimed negative numbers!) - yet they keep selling it on to the next guy, never a book club (the contract says they have to give me money in that case), and are still selling this thing WAY overpriced...and I know as it contains code with my email address they forgot to sanitize like the rest, and I still get mails a decade later - so I know roughly about how much they lie about sales.
They may have helped disseminate information at one time. That time is long past. May they all fall in a pit and die in a fire.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 19:15 GMT Dr Paul Taylor
refereeing and typesetting
Thank you for the first journalistic article I have seen on this topic that says it honestly as it is: researchers do all the work in producing journals, publishers do nothing. Researchers always did the (research and authorship, obviously, and) refereeing, but for the last 30 years (thanks to LaTeX) they have done the typesetting too. In fact Springer mangled the typesetting of the last paper of mine that they published, despite repeated assurances from the editor of the volume that they wouldn't touch it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
