Yann LeCun - Google+ - REQUEST TO REVIEW: Dear Professor LeCun, Given your…

Given your expertise in the field and, particularly, the link between the topics faced in submission XXXX and your research activities, I am inviting you to be a reviewer for the above mentioned article.

I would very much appreciate it if you could promptly find the time to give a quick look at this article and decide whether you can accept the invitation to review it. If you kindly accept the invitation, please return your report within 4 weeks after you accepted the invitation.

MY RESPONSE:
Dear Professor YYY,

Although this paper seems to fall squarely in my area of expertise, I must decline to review it.

I have pledged to no longer do any volunteer work, including reviewing, for non-open access publications, which unfortunately includes pretty much every publication from [commercial-publisher].

In fact [commercial-publisher] is one of the worst offenders in the rear-guard battle of commercial scientific publishers against open access. Why should people pay $31 to read individual papers when they could get them for free if they were published by JMLR?

Incidentally, I have proposed a new publishing model based on open
access and an open, post-publication reviewing system.
It is described here:
http://yann.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets/publishing-models.html
Your comments and suggestions would be welcome.

We are experimenting with this new model in the context of the
first International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2013)
representationlearning2013

Sincerely,

  -- Yann LeCun