As I said in Rob's thingy, I hope you get the tenure committees and job committees, because they don't have to respect it but they're the ones you have to get to respect
All we can do is work hard to build academic support:
* 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.
Can you share a "behind the scenes" of what it took to get Distill off the ground? You hint at dotting your "i"s and crossing your "t"s, but an explicit manual would be useful. Other communities than just machine learning could benefit from something like this, and if Distill succeeds in being taken seriously by your research community, it would help to have a playbook in which to replicate that success in other research communities as well.
My concern is also the academic & industrial support community will support the concentration of a few contributing institutions to such a journal. I have no doubt that Distill will have high-impact and visibility among various audiences.
Yet I don't see how this will readily support possibly cutting-edge work or new research in machine learning that does not have access to visualization development, or these forged connections to Distill to facilitate the development of these visualizations.
So it seems like a likely outcome is that Distill publishes content from well-regarded institutions and increases publicity for that work, to the detriment of a vast bulk of papers which do not have access to the visualization resources to develop Distill-ed versions of their work.
Furthermore, and this is a larger disciplinary issue, but it seems inherently this could end up spotlighting more CS-y machine learning vs statistical learning due to cultural differences between disciplines and differences in computational/web development background in grad students and researchers in both fields. Are there efforts to reach out to statistical associations as well?
It varies heavily by institution and country, but CS is moving increasingly towards caring about citation metrics above anything else (with "selectivity", i.e. a high bar for peer review and low acceptance rate, being the main other factor). Unlike in most other fields, conference papers therefore hold weight, not only journal articles. This does sometimes cause trouble at higher levels of large institutions, where a CS dept strongly recommends a candidate for tenure, but when the case makes it up to the dean level, the dean, who is a physicist or biomed person, wonders how they could possibly recommend tenure for someone who has "just" a bunch of conference papers and few journal articles. But that is becoming rarer at places with top CS departments.
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.
Agree with a lot of this. If Google wanted they could probably even give some extra boost to forms of publication they endorse. I'd love to see Open Access weighted higher in Scholar and they could add an extra boost for "interactive examples" or "available data sets". I think you're spot on that they hold quite a bit of power (high GS ranking is also an incredible citation boost for the typical "tack on citations").
I see comments like this all the time, and while what you say is correct, I think committees increasingly appreciate this sort of thing - frankly they have to or they will miss out on some of the most innovative people. There is plenty of "standard" already (nothing wrong with that of course).
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).
Thank you for this effort. I'm a fan of your blog articles. A question regarding Distill: is it a journal like conventional journal to target new research? Or it is a journal for educational articles to explain old researches better?
I hope to contribute to an effort to better explain deep learning. I don't know if that is what distill is looking for?
So would an article explaining the basics of say dynamic programming be of interest? Are there "page" limits. For example, would a tutorial article that is about 20-30 pages in a traditional paper format be okay?