5 ms·

Statement on Nature Machine Intelligence

168 points by wei_jok 8y ago

mizzao 8y ago
Some big names signed there. Sounds like a death sentence for this journal, despite the prestigious pedigree. Either it will wither or become a second-rate trashcan.
- _delirium 8y ago
  I do notice no Google names, though. Google has tended to favor Nature in the past, e.g. AlphaGo went there instead of to an open-access ML journal. Of course regular Nature has an established level of prestige that this new Nature spinoff doesn't yet. So it'll be interesting to see which way they go on it.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Ian Goodfellow just signed it and there are 4 others. (I hope Dietterich verifies the authenticity of these singatures. Someone could just add these as a prank.)
  - ericjang 8y ago
    There is at least one Google researcher on that list (and various academic professors on that list are employed by Google as consultants).
  - hardmaru 8y ago
    I signed it.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    It will be interesting to see if Geoffrey Hinton signs.
    - esue-isa 8y ago
      Mr Hinton for sure sign this before people prepare statement :]
    - agi_is_coming 8y ago
      His page mentions that he's not working currently due to personal reasons, so you might not see his signature. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    Jeff Dean signed it, so...
  - wei_jok 8y ago
    Jeff Dean: https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/990390991260606464?s=21 https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/990390991260606464?s=21
nafizh 8y ago
I think (correct me if I am wrong) machine learning (and a lot of other fields within CS) is the first field that has completely shattered the closed journal type system in Academia. I work in an interdisciplinary field with an ML focus, and many non-ML faculty and collaborators are just so surprised hearing how the machine learning community generally approaches publications. There is no need whatsoever for the ML field to go back. I also feel the cat is out of the bag for ML, and there is no turning back into a system that Nature promotes even if they are trying to.
- peterhj 8y ago
  arXiv started out with physics preprints.
Smerity 8y ago
There are already big names in this list and it was a a tenth (~30) only a few hours ago when I signed. Yoshua Bengio, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, ... Even if it only represents their personal opinion, like herd immunity I'm certain this will prevent widespread adoption. When I started in NLP as an undergrad, almost all the papers I cared about were free to read from the ACL Anthology. As I shifted into broader machine learning, arXiv became my new home. Nature's closed Machine Intelligence would be a step back. I am glad that researchers and scientists want to keep research open and accessible. P.S. It's already weird that Nature has DeepMind papers. At least in that case DeepMind have a formalized agreement / enough clout that they can host the paper themselves but even the hint of ambiguity can kill knowledge propagation at many institutions. An example would be "Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge"[0] / "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search"[1]. [0]: https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pdf https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pd... [1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaG...
- tedivm 8y ago
  You don't need special clout for most journals (including Nature) in order to self publish. The Nature license [1] allows it directly, as do journals such as Science. The main thing is that they typically don't allow you to publish it outside of your website. I also don't know what the terms of this new journal are going to be. [1] https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html
  - baylearn 8y ago
    Nature does have an "Open Access" option in their policy: "Authors wishing to publish open access retrospectively should contact the individual journal editorial office, and will need to sign a new open access licence to publish form (LTP) and pay the journal's article processing charge." http://www.nature.com/openresearch/about-open-access/policies-journals/ http://www.nature.com/openresearch/about-open-access/policie... However, they don't disclose how much money it costs to convert one's work to open access, and whether this option is available for all Nature journals, the main Nature journal, or just the specialized subject journals, such as Nature Machine Intelligence.
wei_jok 8y ago
Nature Machine Intelligence responded: https://twitter.com/natmachintell/status/990503910673715200?s=21 https://twitter.com/natmachintell/status/990503910673715200?...

168 points by wei_jok 8y ago

Some big names signed there. Sounds like a death sentence for this journal, despite the prestigious pedigree. Either it will wither or become a second-rate trashcan.

_delirium 8y ago
I do notice no Google names, though. Google has tended to favor Nature in the past, e.g. AlphaGo went there instead of to an open-access ML journal. Of course regular Nature has an established level of prestige that this new Nature spinoff doesn't yet. So it'll be interesting to see which way they go on it.
- nabla9 8y ago
  Ian Goodfellow just signed it and there are 4 others. (I hope Dietterich verifies the authenticity of these singatures. Someone could just add these as a prank.)
- ericjang 8y ago
  There is at least one Google researcher on that list (and various academic professors on that list are employed by Google as consultants).
- hardmaru 8y ago
  I signed it.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  It will be interesting to see if Geoffrey Hinton signs.
  - esue-isa 8y ago
    Mr Hinton for sure sign this before people prepare statement :]
  - agi_is_coming 8y ago
    His page mentions that he's not working currently due to personal reasons, so you might not see his signature. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Jeff Dean signed it, so...
- wei_jok 8y ago
  Jeff Dean: https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/990390991260606464?s=21 https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/990390991260606464?s=21

nafizh 8y ago

I think (correct me if I am wrong) machine learning (and a lot of other fields within CS) is the first field that has completely shattered the closed journal type system in Academia. I work in an interdisciplinary field with an ML focus, and many non-ML faculty and collaborators are just so surprised hearing how the machine learning community generally approaches publications. There is no need whatsoever for the ML field to go back. I also feel the cat is out of the bag for ML, and there is no turning back into a system that Nature promotes even if they are trying to.

peterhj 8y ago
arXiv started out with physics preprints.

Smerity 8y ago

There are already big names in this list and it was a a tenth (~30) only a few hours ago when I signed. Yoshua Bengio, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, ... Even if it only represents their personal opinion, like herd immunity I'm certain this will prevent widespread adoption. When I started in NLP as an undergrad, almost all the papers I cared about were free to read from the ACL Anthology. As I shifted into broader machine learning, arXiv became my new home. Nature's closed Machine Intelligence would be a step back. I am glad that researchers and scientists want to keep research open and accessible. P.S. It's already weird that Nature has DeepMind papers. At least in that case DeepMind have a formalized agreement / enough clout that they can host the paper themselves but even the hint of ambiguity can kill knowledge propagation at many institutions. An example would be "Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge"[0] / "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search"[1]. [0]: https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pdf https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pd... [1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaG...

tedivm 8y ago
You don't need special clout for most journals (including Nature) in order to self publish. The Nature license [1] allows it directly, as do journals such as Science. The main thing is that they typically don't allow you to publish it outside of your website. I also don't know what the terms of this new journal are going to be. [1] https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html
- baylearn 8y ago
  Nature does have an "Open Access" option in their policy: "Authors wishing to publish open access retrospectively should contact the individual journal editorial office, and will need to sign a new open access licence to publish form (LTP) and pay the journal's article processing charge." http://www.nature.com/openresearch/about-open-access/policies-journals/ http://www.nature.com/openresearch/about-open-access/policie... However, they don't disclose how much money it costs to convert one's work to open access, and whether this option is available for all Nature journals, the main Nature journal, or just the specialized subject journals, such as Nature Machine Intelligence.

wei_jok 8y ago

Nature Machine Intelligence responded: https://twitter.com/natmachintell/status/990503910673715200?s=21 https://twitter.com/natmachintell/status/990503910673715200?...