5 ms·

It is funny how the world wide web was invented for the purpose of improving scientific publishing. It revolutionized everything but scientific publishing. Scie

It is funny how the world wide web was invented for the purpose of improving scientific publishing. It revolutionized everything but scientific publishing. Scientists still seem to be publishing their research as PDFs with citations written at the end of the page

kybernetikos 8y ago
Same for Java - it was invented for applets and ended up being used for everything except applets.
- arethuza 8y ago
  I think it was actually first created for devices (specifically set top boxes) but never really found a home there and then someone wrote a browser in it (HotJava) that supported executable content and it took off from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#Hi...
Cyphase 8y ago
As an aside, you may be interested in this article from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scientific-paper-is-obsolete/556676/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scie... It basically makes the case that things like Jupyter notebooks are the future of scientific publishing. And here's the accompanying HN discussion for convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764321
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SiempreViernes 8y ago
I'd say open access journals are a pretty big change to scientific publishing, and that started with the preprint archives at around 1991 with arxiv. Beyond that, the web wasn't created to improve publishing, it just did as a side effect. It was started for information exchange within collaboration, and it certainly has done that. Experimental collaborations at CERN in the 80's were not too large at most around 50 authors (NA31 < 40 , NA32 < 50 ), by the next generation it was up to 350 distributed over 32 locations, and the current collaborations are at around 3000 over 180 locations. The web is a crucial component of the information systems that allow these collaborations to function at all.
- ktpsns 8y ago
  Of course it is, science works differently then 30 years ago. But the output, at the end, is still papers which look not only like 30 years ago, but like 100 years ago! With Latex, we have a powerful tool at the hand which makes sure every single student can write himself a perfectly shaped PDF which looks timeless. It doesn't even matter whether your favourite open access journal renders the paper as HTML -- they only took the Latex and transformed it. It also doesn't matter that we have meta search engines for literature references (for instance http://inspirehep.net/ http://inspirehep.net/ or https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/), or that we do have archives for uploading scientific data (https://zenodo.org/ https://zenodo.org/ or in general https://www.re3data.org/ https://www.re3data.org/): The papers are still non-interactive, still linear (not clickable hypertext). Science is old fashioned and slowly moving...
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    The output of science is human knowledge, the printouts is only the transport layer. For conveying results, the fact is that making graphs with sliders is usually not worth the effort: you can always make a static figure that tells the same story, and usually with much less effort spent on making sure your sliders don't show anything distracting. You seem to object simply on the basis that an existing system is old, do you also find it objectionable that some typefaces we use can be traced back thousands of years?
    - ktpsns 8y ago
      Just as much as "a picture is worth a thousand words", I claim a movie can be worth a thousands of pictures. Of course it heavily depends on the research field. I recently worked in fluid dynamics where it is natural to watch movies and publications only have still images, which is always worse. Everybody finds them worse but nevertheless the community sticks to an overtaken way of sharing results.

kybernetikos 8y ago

Same for Java - it was invented for applets and ended up being used for everything except applets.

arethuza 8y ago
I think it was actually first created for devices (specifically set top boxes) but never really found a home there and then someone wrote a browser in it (HotJava) that supported executable content and it took off from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#Hi...

Cyphase 8y ago

As an aside, you may be interested in this article from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scientific-paper-is-obsolete/556676/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scie... It basically makes the case that things like Jupyter notebooks are the future of scientific publishing. And here's the accompanying HN discussion for convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764321

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

SiempreViernes 8y ago

I'd say open access journals are a pretty big change to scientific publishing, and that started with the preprint archives at around 1991 with arxiv. Beyond that, the web wasn't created to improve publishing, it just did as a side effect. It was started for information exchange within collaboration, and it certainly has done that. Experimental collaborations at CERN in the 80's were not too large at most around 50 authors (NA31 < 40 , NA32 < 50 ), by the next generation it was up to 350 distributed over 32 locations, and the current collaborations are at around 3000 over 180 locations. The web is a crucial component of the information systems that allow these collaborations to function at all.

ktpsns 8y ago
Of course it is, science works differently then 30 years ago. But the output, at the end, is still papers which look not only like 30 years ago, but like 100 years ago! With Latex, we have a powerful tool at the hand which makes sure every single student can write himself a perfectly shaped PDF which looks timeless. It doesn't even matter whether your favourite open access journal renders the paper as HTML -- they only took the Latex and transformed it. It also doesn't matter that we have meta search engines for literature references (for instance http://inspirehep.net/ http://inspirehep.net/ or https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/), or that we do have archives for uploading scientific data (https://zenodo.org/ https://zenodo.org/ or in general https://www.re3data.org/ https://www.re3data.org/): The papers are still non-interactive, still linear (not clickable hypertext). Science is old fashioned and slowly moving...
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  The output of science is human knowledge, the printouts is only the transport layer. For conveying results, the fact is that making graphs with sliders is usually not worth the effort: you can always make a static figure that tells the same story, and usually with much less effort spent on making sure your sliders don't show anything distracting. You seem to object simply on the basis that an existing system is old, do you also find it objectionable that some typefaces we use can be traced back thousands of years?
  - ktpsns 8y ago
    Just as much as "a picture is worth a thousand words", I claim a movie can be worth a thousands of pictures. Of course it heavily depends on the research field. I recently worked in fluid dynamics where it is natural to watch movies and publications only have still images, which is always worse. Everybody finds them worse but nevertheless the community sticks to an overtaken way of sharing results.