Statements on Statements

In episode 9 of season 4 we talk about the Statement on Nature Machine Intelligence. We reached out to Nature for a statement on the statement and received the following: “At Springer Nature we are very clear in our mission to advance discovery and help researchers share their work. Having an extensive, and growing, open access portfolio is one important way we do this but it is important to remember that while open access has been around for 20 years now it still only accounts for a small percentage of overall global research output with demand for subscription content remaining high. This is because the move to open access is complex, and for many, simply not a viable option. Nature Machine Intelligence is a new subscription journal that aims to stimulate cross-disciplinary interactions, reach broad audiences and explore the impact that AI research has on other fields by publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary on machine learning, robotics and AI. It involves substantial editorial development, offers high levels of author service and publishes informative, accessible content beyond primary research all of which requires considerable investment. At present, we believe that the fairest way of producing highly selective journals like this one and ensuring their long-term sustainability as a resource for the widest possible community, is to spread these costs among many readers — instead of having them borne by a few authors.     We also offer multiple open access options for AI authors. We already publish AI papers in Scientific Reports and Nature Communications, which are the largest open access journal in the world and the most cited open access journal respectively. We offer hybrid publishing options and are set to launch a new AI multidisciplinary, open access journal later this year. We help all researchers to freely share their discoveries by encouraging preprint posting and data- and code-sharing and continue to extend access to all Nature journals in various ways, including our free SharedIt content-sharing initiative, which provides authors and subscribers with shareable links to view-only versions of published papers.” We also get a chance to talk with Maithra Raghu from the Google Brain team about her work.