Machine-learning scientists vow to boycott new journal

Thousands of machine-learning scientists have said that they will boycott a new closed-access Nature journal in a dispute that illustrates unease over how publishers use prestigious brands to muscle in to new disciplines. More than 2,500 researchers have signed a petition declaring that they will not submit to, review or edit for Nature Machine Intelligence, set to launch in January, which will charge subscription fees for access in a discipline where "virtually all" publication outlets are open. Academics are concerned that the Nature brand could entice researchers away from open-access alternatives. Christoph Lippert, head of a statistical genomics lab at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, who has signed the petition, said that researchers in the field "are not used to brand-name journals. In fact, no journal in the field has more than a single-digit impact factor," he said, referring to a controversial measure of journal prestige based on average paper citation counts.