Comment by munfred
4 years ago
> 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!
Thanks for the kind remark!
> I don't think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing "few" things at all.
Unfortunately, I think it's tricky to do this in a journal format. If you accept submissions, you'll have a constant flow of articles -- which vary greatly in quality -- who's authors very reasonably want timely help and a publication decision. And so it's very hard to go slow and do less, even if that's what would be right for you.
> Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? ...
I don't think funding is the primary problem. I'm personally fortunate to have a good job, and happily spend a couple thousand a year out of pocket to cover Distill's operating expenses.
I think the key problem is that Distill's structure means that we can't really control how much energy it takes from us, nor chose to focus our energy on the things about Distill that excites us.
Yeah, the real question shouldn't be whether something looks productive on the short term, but whether it has a good chance to help us move forward or not. Sometimes we move a lot... without going anywhere; and I don't think that's necessarily terrible, we can also learn a lot from it, but it definitely shouldn't be the only model. At some point you should be allowed to try to go on a long journey. Everyone needs to decide for themselves whether what they are making is relevant or not, and from there on we just need to trust people.