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The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @03:42AM
If you write a scientific paper now and publish in a decent open access journal and/or on a pre-print server like arXiv, it's going to be available to every scientist for the foreseeable future, which is indistinguishable from eternity. That's not true for closed journals where you may lose access. As to Mathematica or IPython notebooks, you can already attach them as supplementary materials. Whether or not those are readable in the distant future is unclear. Mathematica may be unaffordable and who knows about IPython. A lot of scientists don't have that software. But I've seen people attach PDFs prints of their notebooks as supplementary material, because everyone can read PDFs, even on a phone or e-reader.
PDFs are suitable for archiving papers, because society has a large interest in keeping PDFs readable but computer notebooks are subject to the whims of developers. Once the next shiny thing comes along, IPython could rot away. The biggest obstacle to current papers being read in the future might be language. Current English could become so dated that nobody wants to read it (would you want to struggle through a paper in Old English?) or the dominant language could change (e.g. to Chinese).