[fnl]

How does this provide IF ratings? Probably irrelevant for industry, but publishing in academia is all about IF, no matter how bad and corrupt one might think it is.

And what about long-term stability/presence. Most top journals and their publishing houses (NPG, Elsevier, Springer) are likely to hang around for another decade (or two...), while I don't feel so sure about that for a product like GitHub. Maybe Distill is/will be officially backed (financially) by the industry names supporting it?

That being said, I'd love seeing this succeed, but there seems much to be done to get this really "off the ground" beyond being a (much?!) nicer GitXiv.

[colah3]

Our present JIF is undefined because we haven't existed for two years yet.

If you just apply the formulas anyways, you'll get an JIF of (6 citations)/(4 publications) = 1.5. Again, this number is really pessimistic because those publications are only a few months old and haven't had time to accumulate citations.

> And what about long-term stability/presence.

We aren't particularly tied to github besides it being convenient. Even if the journal died, keeping it up indefinitely would be very cheap.

More than that, we're looking into joining projects like LOCKSS to ensure preservation of the academic record.

> but there seems much to be done to get this really "off the ground" beyond being a (much?!) nicer GitXiv.

We've actually done a lot of the logistics needed to legitimize a journal. We've registered as a journal with the library of congress, joined CrossRef, and built infrastructure to integrate our metadata with the library system.

Of course, there's a lot more to do. But the biggest thing is to just publish great content and run Distill as a serious, high-quality venue.

[fnl]

I for one am not so convinced GitHub is likely to be around for another decade or two. But whatever, let's just pretend that Distill can always find a free hosting solution, that is not so unlikely. Maybe that's good enough?

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?