Idea: Open Access AI Safety Journal

To the point of peer review, many AI safety researchers already get peer review by circling their drafts around to other researchers.

It seems to me that this is only a good use of your time if the journal became respectable. (Otherwise you barely increase visibility of the field, no one will care about publishing in the journal, and it doesn't help academics' careers much.) There can even be a negative effect where AI safety is perceived as "that fringe field that publishes in <journal>", which makes AI researchers more reluctant to work on safety.

I don't know how a journal becomes respectable but I would expect that it's hard and takes a lot of work (and probably luck), and would want to see a good plan for how the journal will become respectable before I'd be excited to see this happen. I would guess that this wouldn't be doable without the effort of a senior AI/ML researcher.

Would it make sense to build something like this on the top of some already existing solution? For example, to put the articles themselves on arXiv, and only have the separate infrastructure for highlighting the best contributions, providing specialized discussion, or whatever you think would be the most important added value.

That way, even if things go wrong (prior probability: I think high enough), the articles would still remain on arXiv.

(To be more precise, I wouldn't make arXiv mandatory, but rather the default option; you could post the content anywhere, and just provide the link. Division of labor, don't reinvent the wheel, et cetera.)

This is the sort of project I might be willing to take the lead on if folks think it's valuable (I'm currently uncertain enough to commit), but also others might be better positioned to take it over if they find it valuable. I put that out there just to make clear that I'll do it if it seems worth doing, but if someone else is especially excited about the idea I invite you to "steal" it from me and run with it since my time is, alas, currently expensive, I have a lot of other commitments already, and I like doing philosophy in my spare time rather than more work of the sort I normally get paid for.

I think it is great idea, but may be we need "Existential risk journal" which will cover not only AI safety but other things?

The main obstacle I see is that to have a high quality journal, it should be started by well established institution (MIRI or FHI), and also there should be one highly experienced scientific editor who are also deep in the topic and on full time occupation, as well as some funds.

In generally, high quality peer-review improves quality of papers, as reviewers are obliged to find ALL errors. Preprints are good in promoting articles which are already of high quality, but less quality inputs will be mostly ignored, so their authors will get more vague feedback which will slow the process of their improvement.

Ideal system should combine obligatory peer review and commenting from everybody interested, but solving academic publishing problem is another very large task.