Better scientific paper typesetting and publishing

[void4]

https://www.authorea.com/ http://hplgit.github.io/doconce/doc/pub/slides/scientific_writing-1.html http://amacfie.github.io/2015/09/22/github-publishing/

[wanderer]

@frankiebee wants to kill pdfs too

[acook]

I like having offline archives of scientific papers, and frankly modern web browsers are giant and slow. PDFs aren't perfect, but they're self-contained, single file, consistent across systems, and insulated from network activity and changing browser standards.

[void4]

^{Disclaimer: As always, I have no idea what I'm doing, or talking about}

My wish of killing PDFs and Latex ~~might~~ does stem from an intrinsic laziness and feeling of disgust in the face of learning these formats.

What kills me is that

• creation, modification and copying of content is awkward and laborious, sometimes impossible (which incidentally may have the side effect of making racy plagiarism in scientific works more difficult)
• referencing or including existing content is awkward - other systems may make visualization or machine learning applications easier

In general, I'm looking for some human-machine sYnErGiEs. For example, look at http://paperscape.org/ - it sure is beautiful. Now think about what would be possible if there was more metadata, more cross and immediately accessible references: automatic summarization, social analytics (How is the collective human attention distributed? How many researchers are in which fields, where is the most funding, how closely does research tie in with real world products, people and events, where is growth and stagnation etc. etc.), metascience. Referencing https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/11 - tracing new proofs back to their axioms, finding new fields of research... Also, a giant amount of knowledge still only exists in books or the minds of people and might one day be digitalized. There is no way humans are going to read all of this again. Think about outdated knowledge encyclopedias or null results or recalled papers - which may all still be valuable in terms of analyzing research progress and behavior.

In terms of web browsers, what I really miss is the ability to "pin" content (see IPFS) instead of downloading an entire page manually to the file system (which may fetch the desired content only when online) or using just bookmarks, which may become stale after some time.

Incidental observation: A few days ago on a train, I sat next to a researcher who spent about 30 minutes trying to place charts correctly in their neuropsychology paper. The difficulty of the process made me cringe and realize how important presentation formats and UX/UI are. Human brain time is valuable.