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The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete (theatlantic.com)
James Somers, writing for The Atlantic: 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.
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.
The scientific paper will last as long as paper-printing does. It's still very convenient.
That being said, TFA does make a good point about how current technology can do better than paper. If designed well, an interactive document with computer-driven content can convey a deeper and clearer message.
Better still, perhaps an AI embedded within the document could answer questions about it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I'm not sure what is going on here, except that the summary reads like clickbait.
The rule of thumb I was taught was that you write your papers with the assumption that your reader's got only a basic background in the field. We're talking 'has completed a minor in the field' levels at most, typically--you fill in the holes necessary to understand the paper itself in the introduction. At least in the fields I was in, nearly anything that made it into a significant journal--meaning, anything worth even reading the abstract--would be using one of a set of programs for the number crunching, and at least some of the options were open source. Unless there were privacy concerns, you generally could get a copy of the data sets with a few emails if you wanted to shove 'em through a different one of the standard number-cruching programs--privacy concerns just add a few extra hoops. Regardless of that, somebody should have the raw data and it should be in electronic form. You should typically know before you even start the email conversation if there ought to be privacy concerns; if they claim there are when there shouldn't be, or that they somehow don't have the data still, that's a red flag, especially if you're being very interested in learning more about their research and not in the least bit hostile, because researchers are normally very happy to talk about their work as much as they're able to. (It's a great way to keep one happily chattering away for a while, too.)
If you can't understand the jargon and symbols, and you're got a reasonably good background in the field...Google-fu will help some, but generally it's a sign that you've found a journal to dump papers to when you're in a publish-or-perish situation, and the number of papers published matters more than if any of them are of any quality whatsoever.
The scientific paper isn't obsolete. How publication works and academia's relationship to it, however...
If programs are central to the evaluation of a paper then programs need to be published alongside the paper - in source code form.
It doesn't matter if the source code is published with Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT or no license at all (remains copyright to the authors.)
What matters is that the source code is available to review alongside the paper. In this, it isn't performance that is critical, but bugs that influence results, be they buffer overflows or simply logic errors.
A group of people separate to those that do the peer review of papers then needs to review the source code for correctness as to the results it produces.
One of the main points of a scientific paper is that it's peer reviewed.
A decent paper will probably take around 2 hours to read and 2-12 months to write. As inefficient as this is, it has some desirable properties:
1) It presents information in a somewhat standardized format. After all the gimmicky digital notebooks etc turn to dust and the software which runs them becomes obsolete, the articles will remain.
2) It provides references and allows you to use itself as a starting point to discover more about the subject and the claims.
3) It generally represents an incremental advancement in the field.
Aside from the fact that the article is essentially a Mathematica ad, it is somewhat clear that the author has it written any scientific papers
The Scientific Paper Is not obsolete, it has just fallen into evil ways. Paper or electronic, it is still needed in it's original purpose. It just needs to be "beaten with a blacksmith's hammer to get the rust and crud off" !
So you look at 50 years of advancements and we go (often during a time frame which you didn't reley on the old ways of doing things) Wow, Science was really expanding, Nuclear Power (New way to boil water that we have been doing for thousands of years), Space Craft (Those hundred year old rockets, were finally upscale), Computers! (The hundred year old adding machine and typewriter, got improvements.)
Then you compare it to Today's advancements, Smart Phones, Quantum computing, Genetics.... Where we are comparing 30 years vs 50 years, and being that we are living the improvements, seeing the science that never panned out, and finding the changes to just be improvements on older designs. Where a lot of the failures before you were around to notice them, just kinda fell out of historical memory. They were a lot of sham ideas, and failures, "DDT is good for you and good for me".
Science has been flawed and questioned during WWII - 1900s too. it is just you didn't live it.
Heck, our ISP was out a few weeks, ago so we could only use our cell phones for internet access. (which we have 2 bars) so it was like living in the early 2000's with internet speeds under 1mbs. Too slow for streaming video. And we had to watch TV and work with programs installed on our devices. We have gotten a lot of changes, we just don't realize it until it is taken away.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.