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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Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete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: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:21AM (2 children)
We already have a standard format for publishing documents for on-screen reading: HTML.
What's so special about research publications that they can't just use web technologies like the rest of us, and be easily viewable in the browser with no screwery?
I seem to recall seeing a journal that does publish HTML, but I forget which.
EPUB is essentially just HTML+images bundled into a single file (and made browser-unfriendly), right?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:24AM (1 child)
Forgive the self-reply: HTML should be used as an in addition to format, rather than to replace PDF. I can see the value in PDF/EPUB to preserve exact on-paper formatting.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 10 2018, @01:24PM
Yes, epub is primarily html files in a zip file.
> preserve exact on-paper formatting.
That's the problem. Exact formatting should not matter. The information is what's important. This desire for exact formatting is basically fear that the formatting might contain valuable information that will be lost if not stored in a format that preserves it, such as pdf. A big limitation of epub is that the average epub reader might not support MathML. It is only recently (2015) that MathML was formally added to the HTML5 standard.
Thing is, we don't ourselves know, or care that much, where things will end up until the paper is finished and we generate a pdf from the final write up. The most we do is check that the conversion to pdf didn't screw things up! Too frequently, I find that a bunch of symbols didn't make it into the pdf output, because yet another font was missing the italicized version. Bit disconcerting to have your formulas completely screwed up because the parentheses didn't get copied over. One of the biggest is the simple check that the pdf did not exceed the page limit.
We still don't have good handling of mathematical functions. Instead, I have had to become familiar with LaTeX formatting. In many ways, LaTeX is merely a means of using the much deficient ASCII character set to write formulas, since ASCII doesn't have stuff such as the Set Theory notation, or the integral symbol. I might use MATLAB or Mathematica, but as they are not free, and the math usually isn't that heavy, I use a spreadsheet, or program it in the programming language du jour, or just write it down with old fashioned pencil and paper. Then I translate it into LaTeX.
UTF-8 has the math symbols that are missing from ASCII. We haven't yet integrated this capability into our systems, and it's not so simple as just trading out the LaTeX $\int$ for ∫, UTF-8 character u222b. I expect LaTeX simply would not understand UTF-8 math symbols. Part of the problem is that our mathematical notation itself could use an update.