AI Researchers Boycott Journal Over A Paywall That Many Other Journals Have

One unfortunate truth about scientific journals, especially the ones that feature the most innovative and influential papers, is that they are run as a business. Basically, they make money off of the scientific discoveries and innovations that are published under their catalogs. Now, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have signed a petition to boycott a new journal because it’s doing the same thing.

The petition was signed by over 2,000 AI engineers and researchers, and the journal that they are protesting is Nature Machine Intelligence. It’s actually a fairly new publication, having only been announced, and this is perhaps why it gained so much attention and vitriol from the researchers.

“We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine learning research and believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine learning community would be a retrograde step. In contrast, we would welcome new zero-cost open access journals and conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning,” the petition reads.

Charging money for the privilege of seeing research papers is by no means a new practice. Scientific journals are a business and Nature Machine Intelligence is no different. This doesn’t mean that it’s an ideal situation, but it’s also a fact of life. Anyone who wants to read full articles in journals, especially those that are published under the Nature Publishing Group, will need to fork over some cash to do it, Futurism reports.

These payments can come in the form of either a subscription on a monthly or yearly basis, or it could be done on a per-article setup. In the case of universities or major research organizations, purchasing access for everyone working under them is common practice. However, the financial burden can be a bit too much for independent researchers working on their own budgets.