AI Researchers Are Boycotting Nature's New Machine Intelligence Journal

Springer Nature, the publisher of Scientific American and the venerable scientific journal Nature, intends to stride into the white-hot field of machine learning in early 2019 with a new journal called Nature Machine Intelligence. But the community of machine learning researchers, which prides itself on publishing to open-access journals, was immediately put off by the idea of a closed-access journal that requires academic credentials to read. Thomas Dietterich, the former executive editor of the journal Machine Learning and an emeritus professor of computer science at Oregon State University, posted a pledge not to submit, review or edit for Nature Machine Intelligence, and invited other researchers in the field to sign the pledge as well. At the time of writing, the boycott had accumulated more than 2,400 signatures by employees of Google, Facebook, IBM, Harvard, MIT and a cross-section of other prominent institutions--as well as many of the biggest names in artificial intelligence research including neural network pioneers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio and Google Brain co-founder Jeff Dean. "We write the papers, we copyedit the papers, we typeset the papers, and we review the papers," Dietterich told Motherboard in an email.