Editorial - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Editorial

Richard N. Aslin, Editor

I am extremely pleased that Open Mind has gone from concept to reality with this inaugu-
ral issue of our ﬁrst volume.
It has been a long road. Nick Lindsay at MIT Press had a vi-
sion for creating an open access journal in cognitive science and shared that idea with Josh
Tenenbaum and Ted Gibson. Josh and Ted’s student, Steve Piantadosi, joined my lab as a post-
doc and planted the seed with me. During my sabbatical at MIT, the concept was ﬁne-tuned
into the present journal.

Because Open Mind comes at a transitional phase in the academic publishing industry,
it’s worth summarizing why we chose to start yet another journal and why we chose to do
it as we did. Given the proliferation of academic journals in the past decade, what is the
point of adding one more into the mix? Our primary motivation was to create a high-prestige
journal in the cognitive sciences that focuses on a short-report format published online using
an affordable, gold Open Access model. Wichtig, we follow the Creative Commons CC-BY
licensing guidelines. This allows authors to fully disseminate their articles, provided that they
appropriately cite the copyright holder (MIT Press). This is more efﬁcient than depositing a
pre-publication manuscript (as with NIHMS) or paying an additional fee to eliminate a delay
(typically 1 Jahr) before widespread access via a web-based download site.

We also felt it was time (beyond time, Genau genommen) to push back against two powerful forces:
(1) the predatory pricing of for-proﬁt academic publishers, Und (2) the under-representation of
cognitive science articles in the most highly cited general-coverage science journals. Dort
is ample evidence that major for-proﬁt publishers have recently bought up many academic
journals from smaller publishers who had served the ﬁeld well for decades. These major pub-
lishers offer professional societies, who each typically have their own journals, an income
stream from a modest slice of proﬁts from library subscriptions by universities. Most of these
library subscriptions are paid for by taxpayers, either via state budgets at public universities or
via overhead from federal grants and tuition at private universities. Universities in turn restrict
access to these publications as stipulated by contracts with the publishers, with only registered
members of a university community (z.B., faculty and students) being allowed “free” access.

The predatory pricing comes from the fact that university libraries are loath to drop high-
prestige journals from their portfolio because these journals are the life-blood of academic
advancement by faculty and are a key metric for estimating departmental rankings. Darüber hinaus,
for-proﬁt publishers claim to “solve” the restricted-access problem by charging authors arti-
cle processing charges (APCs or generically, “page fees”) to enable their article to be free to
alle (d.h., open access). But they typically charge the authors $2,000 or more for this privilege despite a marginal cost of zero for enabling the PDF of that article to be accessed on a publicly available website. For-proﬁt publishers have offered another alternative to the highly restrictive nature of publishing in high-prestige journals by creating a plethora of new open-access journals whose reviewing standards are highly variable and whose APCs far exceed any modest proﬁt margin. Their business model is clear—enable anyone to publish just about anything by offering a suite of journals that circumvents library subscriptions by requiring authors to pay-to-publish. Given the pressures in academia to publish and the view by some scientists that publication criteria are arbitrary, there is a ready supply of highly motivated authors willing to ﬁll journals with their manuscripts. a n o p e n a c c e s s j o u r n a l Citation: Aslin, R. N. (2017). Editorial. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 1(1), 1-3. doi:10.1162/opmi_e_00007 DOI: http://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_e_00007 Copyright: © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license The MIT Press l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / Direkte . m i t . / e d u o p m i / l a r t i c e – p d f / / / / / 1 1 1 1 8 6 8 2 3 9 o p m _ e _ 0 0 0 0 7 p d . i f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Editorial Aslin How can we ﬁght back against this for-proﬁt system of academic publishing? One model is to create “home brew” journals by enlisting volunteers to set up a “server in the garage,” conduct peer review for free (the universal standard), and perform all of the tasks of production by the authors themselves. It has been estimated that per-article charges could be reduced to $150. The problem with this model is twofold: (1) it assumes that the average faculty member
is willing to spend the time and have the expertise to produce a manuscript that is professional
in appearance and devoid of errors, Und (2) it is not self-sustaining without a continual inﬂux
of motivated editors who are organized sufﬁciently to pass on their knowledge to the next
Generation. This latter problem is particularly important—scientiﬁc journals are “archival.”
They must remain easily accessible to be useful, and the “home brew” model requires someone
to ensure that the journal is maintained in perpetuity.

A better model, in our judgment, and the one chosen for Open Mind, is to forsake the
for-proﬁt publishing scheme and opt for a non-proﬁt one (d.h., that eliminates investor bene-
ﬁts). At minimum, this eliminates predatory pricing, but it also provides a professional staff
who ensures that the journal production is of high quality and that the resultant documents
are archival. We worked hard to negotiate with MIT Press to provide a professional product
of the highest quality with a modest level of APCs so that authors are not supporting a bloated
for-proﬁt publishing industry. Natürlich, we would prefer that our APCs are zero, and we’re
encouraged by some recent examples of universities diverting a portion of their library sub-
scription budget to pay the APCs of their faculty. That pressure, along with countries such
as the Netherlands requiring government-supported research to be published in open-access
journals, will eventually turn the corner on predatory pricing.

What about the wisdom of adding yet another journal to the cognitive science ﬁeld?
Our overriding concern was that our ﬁeld’s best work was not receiving the kind of accolades
it deserves. Representation of cognitive science in the top two for-proﬁt general-coverage
science journals is paltry (approximately 6–10 articles per year in each, less than 2% of all
articles). Our goal was to provide a forum for work in our ﬁeld that is of equivalent quality
to that published in these journals. We chose a similar short-report format with extensive
supplemental materials to further reduce APCs.

I’m immensely proud of the editorial board and associate editors who have joined our
effort. Not only do they cover all the major sub-ﬁelds of cognitive science, but they are of
the highest stature in these sub-ﬁelds (einschließlich 13 members of the National Academy of
It is also important to note that the gender composition of our editorial team is
Wissenschaften).
50-50, dispelling the myth that cognitive science and other quantitative disciplines must be
male-dominated.

Another important feature of our journal operation is our embrace of “blind” reviewing.
Many general-coverage journals, especially in the biological sciences, reveal to the reviewers
the identities of the authors. There is ample evidence that knowledge of the gender or reputa-
tion of an author leads to substantial bias in the evaluation process, independent of objective
Qualität. No system is devoid of bias (z.B., the associate editors and I have knowledge of au-
thors’ identities), but we are convinced that eliminating one major source of bias is superior to
the alternative of doubling-down on “transparency” by publishing the identities of the review-
ers. Authors need to know they are protected from reviewers’ prior opinions of their work, Und
reviewers need to know they can be free to express their honest opinions about a manuscript.
It is our responsibility as editors to ensure that reviewers are both competent and fair in the
way they express their opinions to the authors.

OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science

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Editorial Aslin

Like other high quality journals, our editorial process involves a “triage” stage to de-
termine whether the manuscript has a reasonable chance of eventually being accepted for
Veröffentlichung. This process entails a fairly rapid (typically 1 week) review by our editorial team.
While this process is not perfect, it has the beneﬁt of eliminating the multi-week delay while
a full review is being conducted of a manuscript that is not likely to meet our standards, Und
thereby reducing the burden on reviewers. Once accepted for publication and when the pro-
duction process is complete, the ﬁnal article is available immediately on the journal’s web site
(no need to wait for each virtual issue to be bundled before an article can be downloaded).

We have also decided, after considerable thought, to encourage but not require two
aspects of recent trends in scientiﬁc publication. Erste, we believe it is important for our ﬁeld to
be concerned about the reliability and replicability of our published ﬁndings. Jedoch, we do
not feel that every published article should be bound by so-called “pre-registration” guidelines.
Although we recognize the bias for only positive results entering the literature, and the difﬁculty
of removing these results if they prove to be false positives, we also recognize the value of new
and unexpected ﬁndings that would never be discovered by the pre-registration model. Wir
fully support meta-analyses of published data to serve as a counterpoint to ﬁle-drawer effects
and p-hacking. Relatedly, we require authors to use the most appropriate statistical analyses,
but we do not agree with the one-size-ﬁts-all model. Sometimes a t-test is sufﬁcient and other
times a mixed model regression or machine-learning method is required. The context and goals
of a study dictate appropriate analysis techniques, and the editorial team sets those standards
during the review process.

Zweite, we urge, but do not require as a policy, the sharing of relevant raw data for every
article that we publish. We provide instructions to authors for a free and easily accessible data
storage system (www.dataverse.org) to streamline the deposit of raw data, with direct links in
the PDF of the published article. Jedoch, there are legitimate reasons why data may not be
immediately shareable with the larger community. Zum Beispiel, video recordings are difﬁcult
to de-identify as the face of the participant is typically visible. If these participants come from a
special sample (z.B., children with a disability) their privacy could be in jeopardy. These issues
are not insurmountable (see the policies and procedures established by www.databrary.org),
but they require discretion. Another example is when an author has labored long and hard
to obtain funding to gather a unique set of data (z.B., from an indigenous group). That author
should be buffered from immediately releasing those hard-earned data before passing them
along to others who exerted no effort in gathering them. Particularly for junior faculty, Sie
deserve a brief moratorium before their more senior (and typically well-funded) colleagues
have access to their raw data.

Endlich, I want to urge you, as both contributors to and consumers of the scientiﬁc liter-
ature, to think hard about why we publish our work, who our intended audience is, and how
best to disseminate our ﬁndings to beneﬁt society. The more we can communicate effectively
to those who support our research infrastructure, the healthier our scholarly enterprise will
become.