Why Thousands of Researchers Are Boycotting Nature's Upcoming AI Journal

Early next year, the Springer Nature publishing group will launch a new subscription journal devoted to artificial intelligence. Like its other journals, Nature will impose a pay wall and restrict access to paying customers--a move that isn't going over well with AI researchers, who say a for-profit subscription journal is not what the field needs right now. Scheduled for launch in January 2019, the new journal will be called Nature Machine Intelligence, and it'll be the 53rd journal to bear the illustrious Nature name. The new online-only journal, headed by editor-in-chief Liesbeth Venema (previously a physics editor at Nature), will cover the "best research from across the field of artificial intelligence," and will include research and perspectives from the "fast-moving" fields of AI, machine learning, and robotics. But if a petition organized by Tom Dietterich from the International Machine Learning Society and a computer scientist at Oregon University is any indication, the new journal won't include content from a sizable portion of the AI research community.