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Comment by shuckles | Hacker News Reader

I will say that having many processes, selectively enforced is a common cover for disparate treatment.

That’s a good point. How many other Google researchers have submitted papers to conferences without waiting for the 2 week internal review to complete? What happened in those cases if the paper failed the internal review? Without more context it’s impossible to tell if this was a case of discrimination or just a case a researcher not following Google’s internal policies and suffering the consequences.

I don't have stats, but when I tried to do this it was made quite clear that I needed to submit 2 weeks early because nobody who reviews can drop their day work to do a priority review for anything less than a superpaper. Most of the people doing paper reviews (just like in academia) are busy and doing them in their "spare time" (evenings, weekends).

I don't think we even need data on this. One or two day prior is unthinkable, just per common sense. Although data points would be valuable and appreciated but we don't really need data to understand the one or two day is just not enough time for anyone or anything.

It's not like there are a bunch of dedicated reviewers, it's always other researchers who review. I don't think some of the most valued papers like MapReduce or BigTable would be reviewed in just a day or two. It's just not a reasonable amount of time in any condition in terms of reviewing research papers.

I worked as a run-of-the-mill engineer at Google and was involved in publishing a paper externally. We couldn't do it the first time around because we finished only 3 days before the external deadline and there wasn't enough time to get it approved internally. This seemed to be very standard around me. People were actually submitting well ahead of time and to me it seems like that Gebru expected the rules to be bent for her if she realistically believed a single day would be enough. Let me just point out that this is a standard practice even in academic research at universities when larger teams are involved.

Having worked at three large academic institutions and been part of the submission process for about a dozen manuscripts, I have never seen or heard of a requirement for an internal administrative approval.

IRB approval for study designs, yes, admin submission of grants, yes, but never an authorization that the results and manuscript could be submitted to a journal or conference

Are you serious? Every large collaboration in e.g. physics has those. You simple cannot create a splinter cell within the organization and publish whatever you want. You have to coordinate with everybody because the work is never truly yours. In case of e.g. CERN, literally thousands of people helped you in some way and they do not want you to potentially tarnish their reputation. Industry AI labs are like that as well. I know this for a fact at least in the organizations I worked at.

It sounds like we’re confusing two things.

What you’re describing in this comment sounds like a consortium. These often an embargo on publication of independent manuscripts until the primary paper(s) have been published. However, once the data’s out, each investigator is free to publish whatever secondary analysis they like.

I understood the Google process to be an _administrative_ approval, based on the conclusions of the paper and unrelated to the quality of the science. This I have never heard of at an academic institution. The final call that a manuscript is ready for publication has always been made by the corresponding/senior authors, not admin.

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