Distill Hiatus
Distill
Distill Hiatus
Authors
Affiliations
Editorial Team
Distill
Published
July 2, 2021
DOI
10.23915/distill.00031
Over the past five years, Distill has supported authors in publishing artifacts that push beyond the traditional expectations of scientific papers. From Gabriel Goh’s interactive exposition of momentum, to an ongoing collaboration exploring self-organizing systems, to a community discussion of a highly debated paper, Distill has been a venue for authors to experiment in scientific communication.<br>But over this time, the editorial team has become less certain whether it makes sense to run Distill as a journal, rather than encourage authors to self-publish. Running Distill as a journal creates a great deal of structural friction, making it hard for us to focus on the aspects of scientific publishing we’re most excited about. Distill is volunteer run and these frictions have caused our team to struggle with burnout.<br>Starting today Distill will be taking a one year hiatus, which may be extended indefinitely. Papers actively under review are not affected by this change, published threads can continue to add to their exploration, and we may publish commentary articles in limited cases. Authors can continue to write Distill-style papers using the Distill template, and either self-publish or submit to venues like VISxAI.<br>The Distill journal was founded as an adapter between traditional and online scientific publishing. We believed that many valuable scientific contributions — such as explanations, interactive articles, and visualizations — were held back by not being seen as “real scientific publications.” Our theory was that if a journal were to publish such artifacts, it would allow authors to benefit from the traditional academic incentive system and enable more of this kind of work.<br>After four years, we no longer believe this theory of impact. First, we don’t think that publishing in a journal like Distill significantly affects how seriously most institutions take non-traditional publications. Instead, it seems that more liberal institutions will take high-quality articles seriously regardless of their venue and style, while more conservative institutions remain unmoved. Secondly, we don’t believe that having a venue is the primary bottleneck to authors producing more Distill-style articles. Instead, we believe the primary bottleneck is the amount of effort it takes to produce these articles and the unusual combination of scientific and design expertise required.<br>We’re proud of the authors Distill has been able to support and the articles it has been able to publish. And we do think that Distill has produced a lot of value. But we don’t think this value has been a product of Distill’s status as a journal. Instead, we believe Distill’s impact has been through:<br>Providing mentorship to authors and potential authors.<br>Providing the Distill template (which is used by many non-Distill authors)<br>Individuals involved in Distill producing excellent articles.<br>Providing encouragement and community to authors.<br>Our sense is that Distill’s journal structure may limit, rather than support, these benefits. It creates a great deal of overhead, political concerns, and is in direct tension with some of these goals.<br>Instead, we think the future for most types of articles is probably self-publication, either on one-off websites or on a hypothetical “Distill Arxiv.” There are a few exceptions where we think centralized journal-like entities probably have an important enduring role, but we think the majority of papers are best served by self-publication.<br>Changes in How We Think About Distill<br>Mentorship is in Tension with Being a Journal<br>Behind the scenes, the largest function of Distill is providing feedback and mentorship. For some of our early articles, we provided more than 50 hours of help with designing diagrams, improving writing style, and shaping scientific communication. Although we’ve generally dialed this down over time, each article still requires significant work. All of this is done by our editors in a volunteer capacity, on top of their regular work responsibilities.<br>The first problem with providing mentorship through an editorial role is that it’s not a very good mechanism for distributing mentorship. Ideally, one wants to provide mentorship early on in projects, to mentees with similar interests, and to a number of mentees that one is capable of providing good mentorship to. Providing mentorship to everyone who submits an article to Distill is overwhelming. Another problem is that our advice is often too late because the article’s foundation is already set. Finally, many authors don’t realize the amount of effort it takes to publish a Distill article.<br>Providing mentorship also creates a challenging dual relationship for an editor. They have both the role of closely supporting and championing the author while also having to accept or reject them in the end. We’ve found this to...