Comment by throwaway71958
9 years ago
Some of the multi-author articles on Distill have a very important (IMO) innovation. They quantify precisely the contribution each author has made to the article. I would like to see this become norm in scientific papers, so on the one hand it'd be clear who to ask questions if they arise, and on the other the various dignitaries won't get their honorary spot on the authors list of papers they were barely involved with scientifically.
As others mentioned, this is common in other fields, it's just not done in machine learning.
We've been reading through the policies of lots of journals that seem thoughtfully run and borrowing good ideas. :P
Other journals, e.g. Nature, already had this. It's not a Distil innovation. But I agree, this should be the norm in journals/confs/etc.