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A New Kind of Scientific Publishing

Scientific papers are static artifacts. You read them, but that is about the limit of your interaction.

You can embed code via links into e.g. PDFs, but code, like knowledge, fades into an insurmountable complexity barrier over time:

  • OS versions change, become outdated
  • documentation, already sparse, becomes incomprehensible
  • configuration and input files become versions so old, no-one even remembers

Even papers dealing with purely computational research accumulate entropy over time.

Publishing journal articles as websites is a step in the right direction, but so far there is vast potential unrealized.

A new way of publishing​

  • embed running code directly into the “article”
    • “articles” are really a combination of applications/workflows/websites
  • articles run in browsers, which are incentivized more than any other platform to run as much old stuff as possible (”Do not break the internet”), while remaining secure
  • rely on code modules that are open source, and published in sources that are meant to be “forever”

Metapages: publish entire reproducible applications as URLs​

https://docs.metapage.io/docs

Metaframes: websites as visualization with editable code​

The following is a visualization of a network. The code can be edited by you, and the updated code runs directly in your browser. To edit or copy the code below, click in the top right below:

This is an example of a metaframe: an editable URL, where configuration/code/data is stored in the URL. A metapage is a set of possibly connected metaframes:

Example 2: python and visualization in the browser, completely self-contained, and editable by you​

This is discussed in more detail here

Example 3: visualization, user interaction​

The following is an embedded metapage application that shows a visual of the sun, and allow you the user to rotate it with your hands (via your webcam):

It consists of three interconnected, communicating metaframes called a metapage. Below is the date flow:

Conclusion​

There is a huge space for durable, high information scientific publishing, that can be shared, remixed, and would allow both casual and deep interactions.