About
Vivum
An open registry for interactive, web-native scientific articles, with community evaluation and threshold-triggered formal peer review.
On the name
Vivum is Latin for living. It is the root of in vivo — alive, in the real organism, as opposed to isolated on a slide. The name carries two meanings central to the platform: the articles themselves are living (interactive, dynamic, explorable — the opposite of a static PDF), and the conversation around them is living too (open comments, community votes, ongoing nominations, and a peer review process the community drives).
Science here is not deposited and archived. It is read, questioned, built upon, and kept alive.
Background
The static PDF cannot represent interactive analyses, live parameter exploration, or dynamic visualizations. This is a structural limitation that disproportionately affects fields where computation and visualization are constitutive of the scientific argument: machine learning, bioinformatics, computational neuroscience, climate science, and statistics, among others.
Between 2016 and 2021,Distill demonstrated that web-native scientific articles could meet a high standard of rigor. Upon entering indefinite hiatus in 2021, the editorial team identified self-publication on one-off websites as the practical path forward, and named a hypothetical open registry — a "Distill arXiv" — as the missing infrastructure. Vivum is that infrastructure, extended beyond machine learning to any field where the interactive format adds scientific value.
How it works
Authors publish independently — on GitHub Pages or any publicly accessible URL — using any web-native format. They retain full ownership. Vivum stores the URL, metadata, and a community discussion thread. It does not host or alter the article.
Registered users can upvote, downvote, comment, and nominate articles for peer review. When an article crosses a composite threshold — derived from score, unique commenters, and nominations — it enters a formal review queue. A reviewer produces a structured review note. The note is published alongside the article, which then receives a DOI via Zenodo and a reviewed status.
Scope
Vivum does not restrict by field or article type. Two kinds of work are in scope:
Novel research — original scientific contributions where the interactive format is constitutive of the argument: live parameter exploration, interactive analysis pipelines, explorable simulations, or dynamic visualizations that cannot be reduced to static figures.
Educational explainers — articles whose primary goal is to build intuition about a concept, method, or dataset. The tradition established by Distill — making complex ideas genuinely understandable through interaction — is explicitly within scope.
Articles that are web presentations of otherwise standard papers, without meaningful interactive contribution, are out of scope.
Review criteria
| Significance | Does the article present a novel scientific contribution or a genuinely illuminating explanation? Is the interactive format necessary to that contribution? |
|---|---|
| Reproducibility | Can the interactive analysis be independently verified? Is source code or data accessible? Are components stable across browsers? |
| Clarity | Does the article communicate its argument clearly? Does the interactive format aid rather than distract from comprehension? |
Suggested formats
Vivum is format-agnostic. Any article that is primarily web-native and publicly accessible is eligible. Formats currently represented include Distill (HTML + Svelte), Observable notebooks, R Shiny, Plotly Dash, Jupyter Book, and custom HTML/JavaScript. Authors using other formats are encouraged to submit.
Governance
Vivum is currently maintained by a single editor. The reviewer pool is drawn from authors whose articles have been peer reviewed on the platform. Governance documentation will be updated as the community scales.