munfred

Indeed, a fantastically written article!

1) What are the differences between Scispot and Benchling?

2) What are the things you offer that nobody else does?

3) How long have you been developing the product?

4) If it is only three people, why would a lab choose you over established players?

Strongly agree on the archival concerns. The reason scientific publishing is nowadays built upon 2D PDFs is that those are the digital analogue of paper.

Distill used a new medium and media, with all the good and bad that comes with it. In my view the biggest challenge is archiving to ensure readability and accessibility in 20, 200, 2000 years. We can read things written in parchment 2000 years ago, we should aspire to properly view digital media 2000 years from now. Yet 2 years from now much of digital media on the internet is already broken. The internet archive is humankind's savior in this regard, but we need to do more, better and faster (because so much digital content is being created and lost before we can save it...).

Regarding Distill specifically, short of a GitHub repo for each article archived in other mirrors, I don't see much else that is straightforward and flexible enough. Even the Distill arXiv idea mentioned would likely have to run on a combination of GitHub + mirrors...

> Another significant risk factor is having unachievable goals. We set extremely high standards for ourselves: with early articles, volunteer editors would often spend 50 or more hours improving articles that were submitted to Distill and bringing them up to the level of quality we aspired to. This invisible effort was comparable to the work of writing a short article of one’s own. It wasn’t sustainable, and this left us with a constant sense that we were falling short. A related issue is that we had trouble setting well-defined boundaries of what we felt we owed to authors who submitted to us.

As someone finishing a PhD, I think that doing LESS and doing it SLOWER is actually a very desirable thing for most of science. We are limited by how fast humans can wrap their heads around articles, and if we have fewer articles that are better written, that's a huge compound gain!

To the Distill team, if anyone is reading this: I don't think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing "few" things at all. We humans to place big emphasis on superficial large numbers in the heat of the moment, but only good things withstand the test of time. I've only read a few Distill articles, but they were all really good and I can see myself coming back to most them 5-10 years from now. I don't think any other academic journal comes close in the ratio of (total goodness)/(total content). Good job Distill team for making a great thing, and summarizing the lessons learned so well in this goodbye article!

My only wish would be that you could find a way to continue to do auch good work that does not entirely rely on unpaid volunteering. In the end of the day volunteering only means some other institution bears the cost of supporting the volunteers.

For example: Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? Could you partner with a university, or even publisher, to support long term writing?

GOOD work takes TIME and is SLOW and we are bad at appreciating that. I hope the distill team keeps taking their time to put out good work, whatever it is they go do next!

Cheers to Distill!

The author of this post raises valid points about some avenues for publishing scientific results. Journals have high barriers, rigid formats, paywall, and sometimes exclusionary reviewers. Twitter and blogs are fringe because they are not formal, but increasingly where the conversation is happening. He advocates for a model like Substack for scientific publishing. Which I don't see how it is different from blogs.

However to me the real problem is that he completely ignores the existence of preprint servers. This started with the arXiv in the 1990s for physics, math and computer science, but finally the model has begun to catch up with other fields. In biology the bioRxiv is well established and I'd say more than half of the papers I see do have a preprint deposited there. For medicine, which has a notoriously protective culture, the medRxiv was launched last year and got a gigantic boost due to the pandemic.

Other fields also have their own preferred preprint repositories. To me preprints solve the gatekeeping and cost barriers very well. I only wish they were a little more tied to comments from the readers (in depth comments of the kind you get during peer review, not the knee jerk ones we're used to seeing on the internet).

I say this because there is almost and "adversarial" relationship between the readers, who just want the bottom line in two sentences, and the authors would like their work to be perceived as a big important and novel contribution. Because of this often papers are written with more flourish language than actually necessary to make a point, and so it is really a hard to parse articles and tell good from bad. Often the "summaries" that peer reviewers wrote before making the comments are better than the official abstract of an article, but readers don't get to see and benefit from them. Each person that reads an article has to redo all that work of judging it for themselves, and with the deluge of articles we have it is simply impossible to keep up.

Initiatives such as openreviews.net are already a big step in the right direction. I think in the next 10-20 years this is where the bulk of scientific publishing is headed. A mix of preprint server coupled with curated community reviews that makes papers much easier to gauge and also incentivizes authors to write better and not bullshit, or risk getting wrecked publicly with the public reviews.

If you open the text and look at section 2 of bill S.2658, you will see the definition of "Large Communications Platform Providers": (7) LARGE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.—The term “large communications platform” means a product or service provided by a communications provider that—

    (A) generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and
    
    (B) has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States.

I find this idea really interesting! Do you have any reference on studies that have looked into the idea or places that have implemented it?

As pointed out, in section 4 of S.2658 this is explicitly prohibited:

C) PROHIBITED CHANGES TO INTERFACES.—A change to an interoperability interface or terms of use made with the purpose, or substantial effect, of unreasonably denying access or undermining interoperability for competing communications services shall be considered a violation of the duty under subparagraph (A) to facilitate and maintain interoperability based on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.