[outrun86]

Distill.pub was one effort to modernize publishing in CS. Chris Olah wrote some thoughts [1] about why he didn’t feel it was tenable. Seems like the primary challenge was the additional effort and skill involved in crafting rich-content/interactive material.

[1] https://distill.pub/2021/distill-hiatus/

[godelski]

Honestly, I don't get why we don't just submit to OpenReview and call it a day. Paper is visible and distributed. There are comment sections where peer review can not just happen, but happen in the open (added bonus!). You can iterate and even see the difference between submissions. What is the conference/journal providing that isn't covered here? A stamp of approval? From a well known noisy system that creates other disincentives?

[vladms]

Not sure the openness of the review would solve so many problems of the system. For example would not touch like reproducibility and data and code availability.

Then you will need moderation (or do you imagine that things will be civilized between people on the internet?) and would need to manage various possibilities of bullying/targeting/etc. Of course these things can happen now, but difference would be between a potentially fully automated and simple system and something very clunky (be friends with an editor, convince him to report who are the reviewers, manage to recognize another of his papers, etc.)

[godelski]

> For example would not touch like reproducibility and data and code availability.

These are different issues, which are certainly important. But I do think in some way this would help. OpenReview does allow you to post comments many months after. Effectively think about this as a GitHub issues page. It certainly could be organized better but it is better than what exists now. OR also has links for code and community implementations (as does arxiv now). Here's an example that has all these things[0]. Granted data is missing, but I don't see why this can't also be integrated, but would need to also push cultural norms.

> Then you will need moderation

I think OR has this a bit solved, similarly arxiv. They are not anonymous accounts and are tied to your ORCID record. Arxiv requires you to have a verifier that is already someone with an arxiv account. Yes, this can be abused, but it is also an easier moderation problem that say Reddit or HN even. I think if you're posting bullying comments under a named profile, then it is good that that is visible so others can see. Mind you, bullying does already exist but it is just behind closed doors. It is worse now because only the Area Chair can take action and often they are over worked and works do get dismissed (which results in A LOT of wasted time, and money) because of this bullying. The larger the field, the more noise too and the more this happens. It is just far less common to see people bullying in public than behind closed doors.

I must stress though, that there is no perfect system here. There is no system that can make the amount of bullying 0. So we have to be careful in our critiques because there will always be valid critiques that are in fact of concern (like this one) but are fundamentally unsolvable. The question then becomes if we improve upon the existing frameworks and if whatever costs have been made are worth the added benefits. So I just want to make sure that this idea isn't killed because an impossible bar, despite the critique being valid.

Edit: I'd actually add that this system encourages reproduction. Because if we still measure on citations and number of publications this means that reproduction works can still count towards those metrics and thus someone's career advancements. The whole conference/journal system currently discourages such effort in favor of the absurdly nebulous novelty concept (which also makes papers noisy). My proposal would also allow for the publication of failures, which is also an important thing for academics.

[0] https://openreview.net/forum?id=Hkxzx0NtDB

[sideshowb]

Promotion and filtering I guess? What does a record label provide when you can just upload music to Spotify?

[godelski]

> What does a record label provide when you can just upload music to Spotify?

I believe this is an illustrative example in support of my proposition, not against. Many artists are in fact turning away from record labels in favor of self publishing. Similarly for books.

But I will say that I still think there's value and so I'll expand on my ideas about conferences. I think they should exist, but be focused on meet and greets. So instead of being an indicator of the validity of work, have them invite authors to speak about their works. Allow others to sign up for poster sessions. How to do that appropriately does need to be worked out, but there's nothing wrong with it simply being under recommendation from the advisement of the organizing members. Yes, there will still be preferential bias, but I do mean "still" because we do have preferential biases towards certain institutions and labs. This would just make it a bit more explicit that they are not the arbitrators of quality but just treated as a "reward."

Importantly I think this allows opening the doors for different kinds of research that are not incentivized by our systems. Most important being reproduction