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If people can post a pre-print to Arxiv then why is it a big deal if it also gets published in Nature Machine Intelligence? Sure a better formatted and edited v

If people can post a pre-print to Arxiv then why is it a big deal if it also gets published in Nature Machine Intelligence? Sure a better formatted and edited version may be behind a paywall but anyone can find the original arxiv paper and get the important points. edit: To make it clear, I'm talking about submitting to BOTH Arxiv, where it's freely available, AND a paywalled journal like Nature. edit 2: I get that we don't want to waste, often government, money on mere distribution of research, but I also think researchers need a way to distinguish their work from the thousands of arxiv papers that get posted every year. Whether that's through a Nature publication or something else is immaterial.

stanfordkid 8y ago
Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society. If "publishing in Nature" is no longer a credential for academics, then Nature can't charge universities big bucks... that money can be spent by institutions on other things (like funding GPU's to do more actual machine learning research)... so boycotting the journal is strictly a good thing.
- mooneater 8y ago
  Hopefully all that money does not have to go into GPUs! Universities in less rich countries would be on a more level playing field, if these massive subscriptions were not table stakes.
  - cossatot 8y ago
    Universities in developing nations get heavily discounted if not free subscription and individual access fees to most journals. Library subscriptions are negotiated on a school-by-school basis and you can be sure that a university in sub-Saharan Africa isn't paying the same as Yale.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society Journals do provide some value. Editing, printing, and herding academics through the camera-ready process all require non-trivial effort. I would have absolutely no problem with a handful of universities/non-profits/even for-profits devoting some staff to the curation/archival process. And also no problem with those organizations charging others modest fees to fund that work. The problem with journals is that they capture a lot more value than they provide, that value is not distributed back to the people doing the actual work, and the prestige signal/branding provides a strong moat. I REALLY think this is an important point. If we continue to behave like all of this stuff is trivial and obvious to replicate, then we'll be forever stuck with predatory journals like Nature.
- cossatot 8y ago
  This is absolutely wrong. Academic journals provide value through scientific aggregation, review, editorial curation, publication, archival curation, and promotion. Yes, you can bypass all of this and put your non-reviewed pdfs on your personal website. No one will care, in part because no one will even know and if they do, they have to do the hard work of review in order to decide whether a paper is worth trusting. But how will anyone find out? As an author, I've made a point never to publish in a paper not backed by a non-profit scientific society with a decent open-access policy, after doing so in the past. I also put all of my pdfs on my website including appropriate white papers that are working drafts, making it clear to others that they haven't been accepted through peer review. As a reader, however, I keep up with the literature (aside from targeted Google Scholar searches) through Table of Contents emails from a few journals--mostly non-profit society journals but a few others including Nature. The editorial curation aspects which limit the number of accepted papers per issue make this possible. I'm not going to drink from the firehose of shit that is produced each month, especially before peer-review. Yeah, it sucks when your paper is accepted by reviewers but gets nixed by the editors because it's not cool enough, but... you know, get back to the bench and make it cooler if you want people to care. Welcome to the 21st century and attention scarcity. You can change the name 'Nature' to whatever open-access journal you'd like, but the power behind it is that it's a sign that Important People have decided your paper is one of the 10 most impactful papers in your field that year. That's why people care.
  - stanfordkid 8y ago
    Maybe I should have stated it as "paid academic journals don't create any marginal value for society vs. unpaid journals" Nature is just a bunch of noted academics that come together and do peer-review (for free btw)... is that enough value creation to charge exorbitant amounts to universities and block content to the public that is funded by government grants? If academics could build a peer-review board themselves (hint: now they can... thanks internet!) ... then everyone would have free access to science.
letitgo12345 8y ago
Nature as a journal also tends to reward hype and exaggeration over concrete results.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Yeah, but think about all the trash they must reject if they let the questionable things trough. I’m also more sceptic that the flagship journals actually have declined, at least in part I suspect the critsism is just complains in the spirit of those about ”the youth of today”.
  - thousandautumns 8y ago
    Actually, some of the biggest problems with modern science are directly caused by journals. One problem is that because they publish the most eye opening studies, they are inherently biasing the results they publish to extreme findings that are anomalous or don't represent reality. If 20 scientists are all conducting similar experiments, a typical experiment design would expect 1 of them to find a statistically significant result when there is none. But due to the way journals review and accept research, often the extreme result will be the one published. In fact, surveys have shown that many of those with the null result won't even bother submitting their findings because they likely won't be accepted. So published research is being biased towards false positive results, which is part of why reproducibility in science is in crisis these days. So while there is certainly bad science being filtered out by journals today, there is actual important "boring" findings that are solid science that are being filtered out as well, and that is damaging science on the whole.
    - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
      > One problem is that because they publish the most eye opening studies Is this really the case? In my own field, it is quite common for us to publish only slight increments of existing knowledge, or we simply debunk an earlier paper. I have also done some work in scientific editing for scholars in other fields, and from what I’ve seen, it seems that they, too, publish similar minor work, even literature reviews where the author does not make any original claims but only summarizes what is out there, and these do get accepted and published. I can definitely imagine that a few über-high-profile journals like Nature might want the flashiest claims and discoveries, but there is a whole world of publishing out there.
sgt101 8y ago
If you have two papers in NIPS every year then yes, your tenure at a big school or .com is assured and all is well. But that is less than the top 0.1% of active ml researchers, and also the most fashionable 0.1% as well. For the rest the impact factor is important in order to get another gig!
projectramo 8y ago
This is a great question, and one that I also have. I think the responders (so far) are missing the crucial point that you suggest publishing in both arxiv and the journal of choice. So the journal of choice, behind a paywall, gives you the prestige and tenure. Meanwhile, arxiv hands the information over to other academics.
Vinnl 8y ago
> Whether that's through a Nature publication or something else is immaterial. But it's not really immaterial, is it? It's a ridiculously expensive way to sift through research, as there is hardly any downwards price pressure at all.

stanfordkid 8y ago

Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society. If "publishing in Nature" is no longer a credential for academics, then Nature can't charge universities big bucks... that money can be spent by institutions on other things (like funding GPU's to do more actual machine learning research)... so boycotting the journal is strictly a good thing.

mooneater 8y ago
Hopefully all that money does not have to go into GPUs! Universities in less rich countries would be on a more level playing field, if these massive subscriptions were not table stakes.
- cossatot 8y ago
  Universities in developing nations get heavily discounted if not free subscription and individual access fees to most journals. Library subscriptions are negotiated on a school-by-school basis and you can be sure that a university in sub-Saharan Africa isn't paying the same as Yale.
throwawayjava 8y ago
> Academic journals don't result in any value creation for society Journals do provide some value. Editing, printing, and herding academics through the camera-ready process all require non-trivial effort. I would have absolutely no problem with a handful of universities/non-profits/even for-profits devoting some staff to the curation/archival process. And also no problem with those organizations charging others modest fees to fund that work. The problem with journals is that they capture a lot more value than they provide, that value is not distributed back to the people doing the actual work, and the prestige signal/branding provides a strong moat. I REALLY think this is an important point. If we continue to behave like all of this stuff is trivial and obvious to replicate, then we'll be forever stuck with predatory journals like Nature.
cossatot 8y ago
This is absolutely wrong. Academic journals provide value through scientific aggregation, review, editorial curation, publication, archival curation, and promotion. Yes, you can bypass all of this and put your non-reviewed pdfs on your personal website. No one will care, in part because no one will even know and if they do, they have to do the hard work of review in order to decide whether a paper is worth trusting. But how will anyone find out? As an author, I've made a point never to publish in a paper not backed by a non-profit scientific society with a decent open-access policy, after doing so in the past. I also put all of my pdfs on my website including appropriate white papers that are working drafts, making it clear to others that they haven't been accepted through peer review. As a reader, however, I keep up with the literature (aside from targeted Google Scholar searches) through Table of Contents emails from a few journals--mostly non-profit society journals but a few others including Nature. The editorial curation aspects which limit the number of accepted papers per issue make this possible. I'm not going to drink from the firehose of shit that is produced each month, especially before peer-review. Yeah, it sucks when your paper is accepted by reviewers but gets nixed by the editors because it's not cool enough, but... you know, get back to the bench and make it cooler if you want people to care. Welcome to the 21st century and attention scarcity. You can change the name 'Nature' to whatever open-access journal you'd like, but the power behind it is that it's a sign that Important People have decided your paper is one of the 10 most impactful papers in your field that year. That's why people care.
- stanfordkid 8y ago
  Maybe I should have stated it as "paid academic journals don't create any marginal value for society vs. unpaid journals" Nature is just a bunch of noted academics that come together and do peer-review (for free btw)... is that enough value creation to charge exorbitant amounts to universities and block content to the public that is funded by government grants? If academics could build a peer-review board themselves (hint: now they can... thanks internet!) ... then everyone would have free access to science.

letitgo12345 8y ago

Nature as a journal also tends to reward hype and exaggeration over concrete results.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Yeah, but think about all the trash they must reject if they let the questionable things trough. I’m also more sceptic that the flagship journals actually have declined, at least in part I suspect the critsism is just complains in the spirit of those about ”the youth of today”.
- thousandautumns 8y ago
  Actually, some of the biggest problems with modern science are directly caused by journals. One problem is that because they publish the most eye opening studies, they are inherently biasing the results they publish to extreme findings that are anomalous or don't represent reality. If 20 scientists are all conducting similar experiments, a typical experiment design would expect 1 of them to find a statistically significant result when there is none. But due to the way journals review and accept research, often the extreme result will be the one published. In fact, surveys have shown that many of those with the null result won't even bother submitting their findings because they likely won't be accepted. So published research is being biased towards false positive results, which is part of why reproducibility in science is in crisis these days. So while there is certainly bad science being filtered out by journals today, there is actual important "boring" findings that are solid science that are being filtered out as well, and that is damaging science on the whole.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    > One problem is that because they publish the most eye opening studies Is this really the case? In my own field, it is quite common for us to publish only slight increments of existing knowledge, or we simply debunk an earlier paper. I have also done some work in scientific editing for scholars in other fields, and from what I’ve seen, it seems that they, too, publish similar minor work, even literature reviews where the author does not make any original claims but only summarizes what is out there, and these do get accepted and published. I can definitely imagine that a few über-high-profile journals like Nature might want the flashiest claims and discoveries, but there is a whole world of publishing out there.

sgt101 8y ago

If you have two papers in NIPS every year then yes, your tenure at a big school or .com is assured and all is well. But that is less than the top 0.1% of active ml researchers, and also the most fashionable 0.1% as well. For the rest the impact factor is important in order to get another gig!

projectramo 8y ago

This is a great question, and one that I also have. I think the responders (so far) are missing the crucial point that you suggest publishing in both arxiv and the journal of choice. So the journal of choice, behind a paywall, gives you the prestige and tenure. Meanwhile, arxiv hands the information over to other academics.

Vinnl 8y ago

> Whether that's through a Nature publication or something else is immaterial. But it's not really immaterial, is it? It's a ridiculously expensive way to sift through research, as there is hardly any downwards price pressure at all.