| This is great but it would have been even better if Distill was designed to play well with the current system. Vast majority of researchers are focused on publishing at various conferences with strict deadlines. Even if they had all the skillsets and time to produce these beautiful illustrations, I highly doubt this will change. Also, it is very likely that veterans in the field might think of this format as too verbose and too sugar coated, more appropriate for less math-savvy users and therefore not mainstream. Furthermore, I really feel TeX is irreplaceable unless you got all of its feature covered. All of the historic effort to replace TeX - even with bells and whistles of WYSIWYG editors - in research has failed and its important to learn from those failures. You will be surprised how many researchers insist on printing out the paper for reading even when they have access to tablets and PC. Instead of being another peer reviewed journal, Distill could act as the following: - platform to publish supplemental material and code - platform to manage communication/issues post publication - platform for readers to invite other readers for peer review and generate "front page" based on some sort of reviewer trust relationship. - platform to host Python and MatLab code with web frontends without researchers having to learn new developer skills - support pdf submissions but without all the eliteness of arxiv and using algorithms to create the "front page" based on some sort of peer reviewer rankings. Above features are indeed sorely missing and Distill has good opportunity to become an "add-on" to current academic publishing systems as opposed to another peer reviewed journal. |