It has been about four and a half months since the announcement. You described these as “build-in-the-open” updates, and in March said initial submissions might open as early as April. The public GitHub organization still has no repositories, the latest blog update was April 28, and I can’t tell from the main site whether the journal is currently accepting real submissions.
I tested Scholastica and found that creating a bare submission portal is nearly trivial. Obviously, creating a credible journal involves much harder work—recruiting editors and reviewers, establishing governance and policies, building the review process, and earning legitimacy. Could you share a concrete status update: what exists today, whether any manuscripts are in the pipeline, the revised launch timeline, and what is currently gating launch?
Thanks for the sanitised version. It is substantially more… tactful.
Yes, these are good questions. The tl;dr is that a whole bunch of stuff has been happening. Some of it has been slower than we hoped. But other parts of it have been harder to do in the open that we hoped. Nonetheless, we are getting close.
I don’t want to do too much foreshadowing of future debriefs (stay tuned for upcoming “do’s and don’t’s of journal founding”), so here is a short concretization of current roadblocks:
1. The main component of an academically respectable journal is the human technology of getting a good board who are
a. academically respected (in some research community) b. have time to volunteer on a project, and c. concur on the scope, aims, and methods of the journal
This turns out to be an intrinsically sensitive and difficult process, which we have not spoken much about. The main reason for that is that it is super important that the board be credible and that the staff and editors have a high-trust relationship and a good process for agreeing on stuff. It has not felt like a wise move for the founders to unilaterally declare exactly what the board will do, before the board itself has decided — otherwise they are not an editorial board Thus we’ve had no flashy announcements of “new journal policy X” while we sort all that out.
One mild friction here has been bringing together people from inside the big institutions (universities, labs) and from outside (independent researchers, research non-profits etc). That is tough, but I think worth it if we want to live up to our pitch.
Nonetheless, we have made a heap of progress there and we are looking forward to sharing who and what our shiny new board is as soon as we can, which will be when they sign off on it.
2. Software! Also happening and also hard but progressing. As you’ve noted, the testing version of the software is online, thanks to the efforts of @Yonatan Cale, who has been labouring away. As also noted, the article “under review” are not real articles. I suspect that the reason we are testing using those will be relatively clear, but to spell it out: we can’t easily do a “real” review. A full review requires anonymity and many hours of human time— the amount of time that you would only commit if you were credibly expecting a possible real publication result at the end. People don’t have maybe-articles and hours of time up their sleeves, typically. Further, the real review is supposed to be partially blinded, which is difficult (although not impossible) to arrange while getting UX feedback from the submitting authors and reviewers. Going to great lengths to fake that out has not seemed like a great use of time, but— watch this space.
Anyway, thanks for the prod! We are, by the way, open to help. If you want to beta test the software, or you have excellent contacts, especially amongst well-credentialled university professors, please get in touch on our volunteer form, or just email contact@alignmentjournal.org
I found five submissions under review. One was satire, two were real alignment papers. One seemed like slop. The last one I’m not equipped to evaluate but it seemed like a decent causal graph theory paper. Based on this, it seems like progress is coming along, and I think it would be good if it kept developing along the same direction. Also, this is the only journal I’m aware of with a sane submission format.
It has been about four and a half months since the announcement. You described these as “build-in-the-open” updates, and in March said initial submissions might open as early as April. The public GitHub organization still has no repositories, the latest blog update was April 28, and I can’t tell from the main site whether the journal is currently accepting real submissions.
I tested Scholastica and found that creating a bare submission portal is nearly trivial. Obviously, creating a credible journal involves much harder work—recruiting editors and reviewers, establishing governance and policies, building the review process, and earning legitimacy. Could you share a concrete status update: what exists today, whether any manuscripts are in the pipeline, the revised launch timeline, and what is currently gating launch?
Thanks for the sanitised version. It is substantially more… tactful.
Yes, these are good questions. The tl;dr is that a whole bunch of stuff has been happening. Some of it has been slower than we hoped. But other parts of it have been harder to do in the open that we hoped. Nonetheless, we are getting close.
I don’t want to do too much foreshadowing of future debriefs (stay tuned for upcoming “do’s and don’t’s of journal founding”), so here is a short concretization of current roadblocks:
1. The main component of an academically respectable journal is the human technology of getting a good board who are
a. academically respected (in some research community)
b. have time to volunteer on a project, and
c. concur on the scope, aims, and methods of the journal
This turns out to be an intrinsically sensitive and difficult process, which we have not spoken much about.
The main reason for that is that it is super important that the board be credible and that the staff and editors have a high-trust relationship and a good process for agreeing on stuff.
It has not felt like a wise move for the founders to unilaterally declare exactly what the board will do, before the board itself has decided — otherwise they are not an editorial board
Thus we’ve had no flashy announcements of “new journal policy X” while we sort all that out.
One mild friction here has been bringing together people from inside the big institutions (universities, labs) and from outside (independent researchers, research non-profits etc). That is tough, but I think worth it if we want to live up to our pitch.
Nonetheless, we have made a heap of progress there and we are looking forward to sharing who and what our shiny new board is as soon as we can, which will be when they sign off on it.
2. Software! Also happening and also hard but progressing. As you’ve noted, the testing version of the software is online, thanks to the efforts of @Yonatan Cale, who has been labouring away.
As also noted, the article “under review” are not real articles. I suspect that the reason we are testing using those will be relatively clear, but to spell it out: we can’t easily do a “real” review.
A full review requires anonymity and many hours of human time— the amount of time that you would only commit if you were credibly expecting a possible real publication result at the end.
People don’t have maybe-articles and hours of time up their sleeves, typically.
Further, the real review is supposed to be partially blinded, which is difficult (although not impossible) to arrange while getting UX feedback from the submitting authors and reviewers. Going to great lengths to fake that out has not seemed like a great use of time, but— watch this space.
Anyway, thanks for the prod!
We are, by the way, open to help. If you want to beta test the software, or you have excellent contacts, especially amongst well-credentialled university professors, please get in touch on our volunteer form, or just email contact@alignmentjournal.org
I found five submissions under review. One was satire, two were real alignment papers. One seemed like slop. The last one I’m not equipped to evaluate but it seemed like a decent causal graph theory paper. Based on this, it seems like progress is coming along, and I think it would be good if it kept developing along the same direction. Also, this is the only journal I’m aware of with a sane submission format.