NeurIPS introduces a track dedicated to advancing kids of rich parents even more than they already are

Let me tell a story about free books. In the mid 1990s, I started a project called DjVu at AT&T Labs. The purpose was to devise a new image compression format so that printed documents could be scanned at high resolution and distributed efficiently over the newly expanding Internet. The format was released in the late 90s/early 00s and adopted by websites li,e the Internet Archive. As a useful demonstration of the technology, I decided to scan and distribute the complete collection of proceedings of the Neural Information Processing conference (NIPS). I asked the publishers, Morgan Kaufman and MIT Press, for permission to do that. They agreed because they weren't making any revenue from past proceedings. We scanned the 13 volumes, OCRed and indexed all of the material, and put it up on a free website in 2000: nips.djvu.org/ This open-access repository turned out to be *extremely* useful to the machine learning research community. Around the same time, the ML community rebelled against commercial journal publishers and created JMLR, which was one of the first open-access and totally free journal. This also turned out to be enormously beneficial. Eventually, the NIPS conference stopped making printed proceedings and started hosting all the books on their website ( nips.cc ), including our scans. If you ever wondered why the ML/AI community embraced a culture of fast posting of preprint and open-access publications, that's it.