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Thanks for the response! Your apology makes me feel more positive about conversations on the internet. :) I genuinely appreciate you giving feedback. Running D

by colah3 6y ago

Thanks for the response! Your apology makes me feel more positive about conversations on the internet. :) I genuinely appreciate you giving feedback. Running Distill is hard, and there's lots of places we make mistakes or could do things better. From my perspective, Distill has to balance a lot of equities. I see one of our major roles as trying to explore new visions of what an academic journal can be, so I put a lot of weight towards us doing weird and unusual things, like these threads. But we also need to take care around process and quality. And sometimes we screw up. Distill is also entirely volunteer run. Everyone involved has full time jobs, and runs Distill on top of that. And honestly, we're often quite exhausted. So sometimes we make mistakes that a better version of ourselves with more time for Distill would not.

SQueeeeeL 6y ago
I really appreciate the idea of a place where code and paper can be intertwined, it's a cool idea for a journal! I also really enjoy journals doing weird unusually things! I just have a penchant for people defining novel terms and not fully exploring existing literature in a field. In my opinion, it creates a very disorienting effect where those who have useful tools to contribute (typically neural network researchers) immediately start on the worst footing. Everyone is constantly playing catch-up in understanding and can't follow the evolution of an idea/methodology over time. I was under the impression that Distill was funded by Google, is this not the case?
- colah3 6y ago
  Nope. There's money committed if we ever run the Distill Prize ($10K prizes recognizing outstanding scientific communication), but that's tied up in legal issues. For regular Distill, all the costs (several thousand dollars a year) come out of volunteer pockets, and all the time is volunteered. Edit: There was a period of 6 months where Firebase (which is connected to Google?) gave us free hosting, reducing our expenses.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    That's impressive, and also re-contextualizes a lot of my feelings towards the journal. Have there been any plans to go more mainline in funding efforts. I know all open access Nature journals are "pay to publish". It's a slippery slope to being predatory, but without university's paying for subscriptions, the funding for a journal must come from somewhere and Nature seems to maintain quality in spite of their model (in this case donations).
    - colah3 6y ago
      We've sometimes discussed it in the context of whether we can "scale up" Distill. But I think at this point I expect us to just stay niche and volunteer focused.
      - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
        Based on one of your twitter the calculated IF of Distill is 23. So if you're journal is reaching so many people, wouldn't moving towards more robust and professional editorial staff be beneficial for the large audience? Or do you think there's a benefit too having volunteers?
        colah3 6y ago
        > if you're journal is reaching so many people ... Just to clarify, impact factor measures the average impact of a paper, not the total impact of the journal. In fact, it divides by the number of papers! So it's much easier to have a high impact factor if you're very small, and it's probably not quite the right way to think of whether society should invest resources in something. (In fact, we technically don't have an IF, just the value that would be an IF if we were bigger. IF isn't officially defined until you reach a certain number of publications a year.) > wouldn't moving towards more robust and professional editorial staff be beneficial for the large audience? Or do you think there's a benefit too having volunteers? I think there's two main things. Firstly, it's just a very difficult transition to make. If we wanted to hire staff, we'd need to find people who were aligned with Distill's vision and wanted to dedicate their carer to it. Hiring is hard! We'd also need to find a reliable funding sources (probably at least 200K/year) that was reliable (we don't want Distill to suddenly disappear!) and dosn't impose negative externalities (like being closed). Secondly, it's a lot harder to experiment when you're big and have commitments to more people. It's already quite hard for Distill to do weird things now -- a lot of people get annoyed to us, and I feel a visceral pressure to be conservative. Also, a lot of our ability to do weird things and have beautiful articles comes from expert attention to individual papers. A lot of early Distill papers involved Shan Carter or I spending 50-100 hours mentoring authors and giving them design and writing feedback. There's no model where that make sense at scale.

by colah3 6y ago

SQueeeeeL 6y ago

I really appreciate the idea of a place where code and paper can be intertwined, it's a cool idea for a journal! I also really enjoy journals doing weird unusually things! I just have a penchant for people defining novel terms and not fully exploring existing literature in a field. In my opinion, it creates a very disorienting effect where those who have useful tools to contribute (typically neural network researchers) immediately start on the worst footing. Everyone is constantly playing catch-up in understanding and can't follow the evolution of an idea/methodology over time. I was under the impression that Distill was funded by Google, is this not the case?

colah3 6y ago
Nope. There's money committed if we ever run the Distill Prize ($10K prizes recognizing outstanding scientific communication), but that's tied up in legal issues. For regular Distill, all the costs (several thousand dollars a year) come out of volunteer pockets, and all the time is volunteered. Edit: There was a period of 6 months where Firebase (which is connected to Google?) gave us free hosting, reducing our expenses.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  That's impressive, and also re-contextualizes a lot of my feelings towards the journal. Have there been any plans to go more mainline in funding efforts. I know all open access Nature journals are "pay to publish". It's a slippery slope to being predatory, but without university's paying for subscriptions, the funding for a journal must come from somewhere and Nature seems to maintain quality in spite of their model (in this case donations).
  - colah3 6y ago
    We've sometimes discussed it in the context of whether we can "scale up" Distill. But I think at this point I expect us to just stay niche and volunteer focused.
    - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
      Based on one of your twitter the calculated IF of Distill is 23. So if you're journal is reaching so many people, wouldn't moving towards more robust and professional editorial staff be beneficial for the large audience? Or do you think there's a benefit too having volunteers?
      - colah3 6y ago
        > if you're journal is reaching so many people ... Just to clarify, impact factor measures the average impact of a paper, not the total impact of the journal. In fact, it divides by the number of papers! So it's much easier to have a high impact factor if you're very small, and it's probably not quite the right way to think of whether society should invest resources in something. (In fact, we technically don't have an IF, just the value that would be an IF if we were bigger. IF isn't officially defined until you reach a certain number of publications a year.) > wouldn't moving towards more robust and professional editorial staff be beneficial for the large audience? Or do you think there's a benefit too having volunteers? I think there's two main things. Firstly, it's just a very difficult transition to make. If we wanted to hire staff, we'd need to find people who were aligned with Distill's vision and wanted to dedicate their carer to it. Hiring is hard! We'd also need to find a reliable funding sources (probably at least 200K/year) that was reliable (we don't want Distill to suddenly disappear!) and dosn't impose negative externalities (like being closed). Secondly, it's a lot harder to experiment when you're big and have commitments to more people. It's already quite hard for Distill to do weird things now -- a lot of people get annoyed to us, and I feel a visceral pressure to be conservative. Also, a lot of our ability to do weird things and have beautiful articles comes from expert attention to individual papers. A lot of early Distill papers involved Shan Carter or I spending 50-100 hours mentoring authors and giving them design and writing feedback. There's no model where that make sense at scale.