Distill: a modern machine learning journal
I sure hope this catches on, but we should all be aware of the hurdles:- Little incentive for researchers to do this beyond their own good will.- 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.- 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.- 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.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?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.