Strategy: publish in the high-impact established Nature-family journal, but publicly boycott the no-impact new Nature-family journal. Win-win.

edit: added -family suffix to clarify that I completely understand these are two different journals from the same publisher.

edit 2: I now understand why the editor of the new journal was hitting senior people up for personal meetings at ICRA last week. He didn't want to hear about our work: he wanted hints to help him on positioning.

one doesn't hinder research, the other does

https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html

Standard practice in the modern AI community is preprint to arXiv first, then out to a journal for review. All the papers are free online before they even go to Nature. So this policy does not stifle or hinder research.

They also do not take copyright - it stays with the authors - unlike other giants such as IEEE.

To my mind the legitimate argument is about publishers taking undeserved profits from unpaid labour while adding little value.

(edit: reordered sentences)

That argument also comes down to hindering research. Funds that could otherwise be used for research are now used to buy subscriptions to this journal.

The journal business model usually requires restricting access to the research, while the conference business model still works when the research is free.

It's also interesting to hear other people's talks that serve as a "teaser" for what's in the paper.

https://www.elementai.com/en/who-we-are

http://mila.quebec/

It is not possible to publish something without setting moveable type made of lead. it would be different if there were an Internet or something but that's way in the future.

To give you a sense of the state of our industry, here is an example of an innovation just four years ago and its effect:

>1814 – First cylinder presses

>Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer build their first cylinder press, which is much faster than the existing flatbed presses. One of the first customers is John Walter of The Times. The first issue of The Times that is printed with the new presses is published in 1814. The press is installed in secret to avoid sabotage by disgruntled pressmen operating the existing Stanhope presses. The machine is capable of printing over 1100 double-sided sheets per hour. In 1817 Koenig & Bauer return to Germany and start building presses in an abandoned monastery in Würzburg.

https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/1800-1849

You can click that link for some pictures. This press needs to be paid for, as well as having ongoing operational costs that include a lot of meticulous manual labor (mentioned above) to set each and every page.

Here is another link which I rewrite to the present:

>There are many reasons to celebrate the advent of the steam press in 1814, as well as reasons to worry about it. Steam printing brings the cost of printing down, increases the number of possible impressions per day by four times, and, in a way, we might say that it helps “democratize” access to information. The Times proclaims that the introduction of steam is the “greatest improvement” to printing since its very invention. Further down that page, which itself is “taken off last night by a mechanical apparatus,” we read why the hand press printers might be concerned: “after the letters are placed by the compositors… little more remains for man to do, than to attend upon, and watch this unconscious agent in its operations.”

https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/steam-press-newspaper-london-ti...

As you can see it talks about "the democratization" of information. Still, my point is that the fixed costs of this publishing model are still high, and that it makes a lot of sense to operate on this publishing model for this reason alone. After reviewing my links and the technology in question, I hope you can readily agree! In 1818 typesetting and printing is an expensive, hardware-based, industrial business. It makes sense to have a publishing house behind it.

Is there any part of what I've just written that you disagree with?

I’m not sure I totally agree with the parallels, which is probably where some of the initial confusion arose from. The printing press significantly reduced the costs of publication, allowing unprecedented access to the written word beyond the aristocracy. I don’t think anyone disagrees that Nature provides a valuable service and that it “makes sense to have a publishing house behind” peer reviewed literature. Rather, when the cost to produce peer-reviewed content can be taken on by tax-subsidized content production professionals, and demonstrably WITHOUT an older journal that extracts exorbitant fees without producing significant value beyond its brand-name, it makes sense to challenge the value of the brand.

Ooh, ooh! raises hand and waves franticly

Nature does jack shit that couldn't be (and in many cases isn't) done as well or better by the authors' personal or institutional websites.

What they "provide" is a brand name for wasteful status signalling, the same as Goochi purses or sportsball teams.

I work for a rather minor corporate entity anyway, does it mean that I am always off the hook? /s

Just because their parent company might not be morally in the clear, that doesn't mean that moral criticisms by its employees is automatically or even more likely to be invalid.

got some references as to why they are big hitters for the uninformed such as myself?

Yann LeCun is head of AI at Facebook and kinda knows as the father of convolutional networks.

There's a bunch of other ones from other big companies or big ivy league universities.