Distill: a modern machine learning journal
I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles:<p>- Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will.<p>- Most ML researchers are bad writers, and it's unlikely that the editing team will do the work needed (which is often a larger reorganization of a paper and ideas) to improve clarity.<p>- Producing great writing and clear, interactive figures, and managing an ongoing github repo require nontrivial amounts of extra time, and researchers already have strained time budgets.<p>- It requires you to learn git, front-end web design, random javascript libraries (I for one think d3 is a nuisance), exacerbating the time suck on tangents to research.<p>Maybe you could convince researchers to contribute with prizes that aligned with their university's goals. Just spitballing here, but maybe for each "top paper" award, get a team together to further clarify the ideas for a public audience, collaborate with the university and their department and some pop-science writers, and get some serious publicity beyond academic circles. If that doesn't convince a university administration that the work is worth the lower publication count, what will?<p>In the worst case it'll be the miserable graduate students' jobs to implement all these publication efforts, and they won't be able to spend time learning how to do research.