Had to lookup what the boycott was about - free access and fees: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/why-are-ai-researcher...

As far as I can tell, the article isn't really of any interest either.

Formulating a proposition that is independent of standard axioms is simple. Formulating it in the language of machine learn is an exercise. The main thing is the authors didn't provide any motivation for this to matter to the overall enterprise of machine learning, because there isn't motivation for this. It's just a novelty.

I don't understand your reasoning. Because, you could also "formulate" CH in the "language" of Turing machines. But that is clearly disanalogous to what the article is saying.

As someone who isn't in the know, I found this[1] Forbes article about the journal. Forbes portrays the opposition as opposing the fact that it's a closed access journal, but are there other points of contention that weren't reported in the article?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2018/04/30/tech-giant-...

That's enough. ML research is posted on arxiv and presented in open conferences. You can paywall your slide deck but not your paper. If pay-to-play journals get even an inch, they'll try to take everything.

What does “open conferences” mean?

Last time I checked, fees for participating in ML related conferences are very high (compared to registration fees for conferences in academic fields with less hype). This makes them less open because cost is a financial barrier to participation.

The proceedings are freely available online and most sessions are freely casted. Attending the conference in person has surely some cost!

Also, if you live outside USA/Europe, let's go to a important conference may be a few thousand of dollars more expensive that sending an email to the editor with the draft of the paper.

[Hi from Argentina!]

what's the reason it's boycotted? appeal to authority isn't very informative for those not keeping up with this stuff

Subscription fee requirements for access, mostly.

and fees for publishing.

i.e. Why should people have to pay to view the results of what is often publicly funded research? Even more so why should researchers have to pay to publish work that the publishers profit off of but the researchers don't.

There's a strange thing, there seems to be a universal rule of Open Access discussions:

There will always be someone who defends publishers based on not knowing anything about how scientific publishing works.

My favourite article about open access, about the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and really the ultimate smackdown, all done very politely: https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

Peer reviewers are not ever paid, making this whole arrangement somewhat bizarre and unsavory to reviewers and authors alike.

Peer review is not paid work. Mostly it is done as an overhead that is understood as part of being an active researcher.

I would even venture to say that most researchers will be against the idea of paid reviews, just like Amazon found out that paid product reviews are a very bad idea.

That's the problem: publishers don't pay reviewers but charge for their work.

>Or maybe I’m just taking crazy pills..

You are. Where did you ever get the idea that nature pays for reviews?

Haha, reviewers getting paid. That's a good one. This journal charges the authors for Pete's sake.

Have any alternative journals in that area popped up that are both open-access and without submission fees?

The premiere journal in Machine Learning, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), has existed in this format since 2001. It is explicitly mentioned in the petition for the boycott: https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/

Which would also explain why Nature wrote this publicity piece on it. I can only hope that ML researchers show the rest of academia the way out of publishers' hands.