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I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.

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Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those are what are considered "legitimate."

Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.

distill.pub IS a legitimate journal.

From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.

Not according to European universities, at least for the purpose of judging faculty CVs when making hiring or tenure decisions.

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