In the short term, Distill's editorial assistance will help authors produce outstanding papers, although they need to be willing to work as well.

In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researchers publishing papers.

And in the very long term, I think the right solution is to add a new component to the research ecosystem. Just like we we have people who specialize as research engineers, theoreticians, and experimentalists, I'd like to have a respected "research distiller" specialization. Eventually, I'd like to try and start special grants for research groups to have someone focused on this.

I'm a junior faculty working in ML with no personal knowledge of web development, d3, etc. While the papers currently on Distill are absolutely gorgeous and will be an invaluable tool for learning advanced ML concepts, I simply cannot see myself or my students putting the time to actually create something like that.

Unless a student is especially adept at the specific tools needed to create these and especially enthusiastic at using them, I will actively discourage them from doing it. The time needed is simply not worth it right now.

I would be happy and grateful if tools for creating these articles become easier to learn and use eventually, such that even the lower-budget, time-constrained researchers could afford to create them.

I won't deny the time commitment needed for a distill article is not trivial - it is far more work than a technical blog. But in terms of a pure tradeoff of time per publication, the calculus makes sense. Most of the work of research distillation and synthesis is already part of the research process, and writing a distill article is just a matter of putting it all of down on paper. Doing research is a far more time consuming and less predictable process.

Hey let's be honest, most academics (that I know) still don't even use LaTeX (or refuse to do so). This is really cool, but requires way too many skills (in js/css3/html5/distill-extensions and node.js).

Personally, my team and I had really great experience with sharelatex.com, whom only I had knowledge about LaTeX. I liked that it's also opensource with a permissive license. I would rather host that on sandstorm.io the next time, or just pay for the comfort offered by overleaf.com (I've never seen such a beautiful colloborative LaTeX Editor).

• What about vendor lock-in?

• Can you export to LaTeX, Word or PDF?

• Can you selfhost it for your team or company?

I clearly don't expect people to do that much. I can only do that because i'm coming from web development, and very nice tools started to appear recently.

People in research needs a design framework like a set of templates for keynotes/PPT/JS/CSS (think about how much traction got bootstrap). Distill is doing an awesome jobs at showing the example of what you could do.

Maybe Distill could open-source the templates they use to build those blog post?

On the other hand, being able to write well and to create good interactive illustrations are valuable skills. Maybe we could incorporate these things into seminars or otherwise crowdsource the creation of e.g. individual figures?

So, I guess this will get distill get traction.

It seems clear to me that the future will involve some kind of linking reproducibility to papers. If we want to find that future, we need a way for people to experiment with what a publication is.

I would recommend picking up a book on Comp Sci or algorithms, even just a cursory reading helps a lot. CS is very much not just programming and it is heavily restricted by descriptions through code.

Should you plug that in to IFTTT, Zapier, or something to that extent, you hopefully then have a weekly feed.

Though I do agree, an option to signup to updates directly on the website would be much better ;)

I made an awesome list recently just for this topic: github.com/sp4ke/awesome-explorables

(One of the members of our steering committee, Michael Nielsen, has a significant history advocating for open science. I think there's about a snowball's chance in hell he'd be involved if we weren't. :P )

Passages like:

"Distill articles must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license."

With a little more flexibility to keep things private before publishing: "You can keep it private during the review process if you would like"

I agree that the DOI should be included in the BibTeX citation.

* In the last three weeks, we've had 80 outreach conversations with various stakeholders for Distill. The majority of these have been academic researchers. The response has been extremely positive.

* A number of ML faculty at Stanford / Berkeley / Toronto / Montreal are very excited and supportive of Distill.

* Distill's steering committee consists of recognized leaders in ML and data visualization.

* We've registered with the library of congres / CrossRef, dotting our "i"s and crossing our "t"s to be a serious journal. In some senses, we're more legitimate than some notable venues.

* The largest industry research groups institutionally support Distill.

My sense is that the academic community really wants to have something like this, if it can be done well. At the end of the day, we need to publish outstanding content and demonstrate that we're a high-quality venue.

Anyway, as a result, I don't see a reason why an alternative-format journal would necessarily fare any worse than conferences have in terms of becoming accepted, if the reviewing standards are high and if it attracts citations.

For the hiring side (more than the tenure side), to some extent, oddly enough, the first-order decision here is in Google's hands. A lot of CS hiring committees nowadays unofficially do a first cut sifting of resumes by typing candidates into Google Scholar and looking at their Google-computed h-index, so what "counts" is basically up to Google.

With new things, what you need is at least one person on the committee to fight and convince the others why this new thing is awesome. As someone who is now on some of these committees, I would put all my weight behind something like this should I encounter it (assuming of course it has the relevant quality).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

Re. IF, sorry if my first post wasn't as as obvious as I thought it would be. I wasn't referring to how IF is calculated, much less to Distill's current IF. Rather, there are two big problems related to IF that Distill needs to "solve"; Not the how, but rather then when and who of IF:

Ad when: The egg and the hen problem. As colah3 wrote, Distill's IF will only become meaningful in two years. But if you have exciting research, you want that to be in an high-impact journal/venue now. So attracting good research as a new journal/venue is extremely difficult, and probably the one main reason why new journals fail (c.f. the number of new journals/venues and the mostly non-existent change in impact rankings of the "best" places to publish). However, if you can get private researchers in industry to publish in Distill, because they are not [so] "dependent" on IF, you might accumulate sufficient impact in the first two years to get to a nice score, that later makes Distill competitive to the various IEEE journals or JMLR.

Ad who: The even worse problem that (at least European, not sure about US) universities evaluate their researchers by looking up their Web of Science ranking/score. WoS in turn is controlled by Thomson Reuters (TR), who also decide which journals get ranked in WoS (and sell access to WoS to universities and governments - n/c...). If a journal is not "recognized" by WoS, the publication or its citations do not get counted by TR. Ergo, as a public researcher, your funding dries up and/or you don't get the promotions you need. For that reason alone, no researcher in public research will allow her/his students and postdocs to publish in a journal that is not indexed by TR/WoS. But again, you might get around that by behaving "like" arXiv at first, at least: Most journals now grudgingly accept that the work was first on arXiv before it got published in some high-impact journal or venue. And maybe there is even a chance that the publishing industry will have to accept Distill in their midst (i.e., index it in WoS) if some other industrial backers create enough pressure...

As might be clear from the above, I (and many researchers) am (are) fed up with the current publishing system, so I certainly hope a "self-hosted", free solution controlled by the public [researchers] one day will break the iron first the current (private) publishing houses exert over how research is managed and evaluated today. If Distill manages to keep itself independent from industry, but at the same time can use the political weight its current backing could bring, maybe this is a way to break this vicious cycle?