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Papers (and PDFs) are relevant because they are easy to organize and archive, essentially in perpetuity. Source code is too, so nothing wrong with a "Github for
by goerz 9y ago
Papers (and PDFs) are relevant because they are easy to organize and archive, essentially in perpetuity. Source code is too, so nothing wrong with a "Github for Science". Notebooks, blogs, or interactive dashboards, on the other hand, are an amazing tool both for research and for communication, but they are far more ephemeral than a paper. They need a large overhead to keep them running that cannot be sustained over decades or centuries. Typically, you'll have lots of trouble re-running a 5 year old notebook. That's not to say they're useless, e.g. as supplementary material (quite the opposite). They're just not going to replace papers anytime soon.
- hprotagonist 9y agoThose are good points. Journals have to care about this, too, these days -- supplementary information now routinely includes videos (hope you have the right codecs!), word documents, audio, and full or redacted data sets. I think what appeals to me about literate programming style is that it encourages a return to a more clear and expository style of writing, which has been squeezed out of scientific writing in journals over the years. I don't care what instantiation is required to produce a more uniformly clear and cogent document, I just care that it happens.