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Did journal articles survive the last ten years?

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Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing. Let’s ignore the somewhat dated references to Twitter and Skype, and listen in on those two starry-eyed youngsters …


Matt: People will continue to publish papers (as currently understood) beyond the natural lifespan of the medium, because papers are easy to count. But the very word ‘paper’ betrays the weakness of the form: it was dictated by a few centuries of reliance on physically publishing science on dead trees. It does not need to be now. And people are veeerrrrry gradually waking up to that fact.

Mike: “Paper” is funny, sure, but no more so than “file” or “folder”. It’s really just an old word repurposed. I don’t think the fact that it’s a homonym of an obsolete storage medium really betrays a Think Fail, just some history. I think papers will always exist. Even if we start to call them something else, like articles. Because a single, coherent, crafted narrative about a hunk of research is an inherently useful thing.

Matt: Papers may always exist, but other forms that are less constrained in space and time will spring up around them.

Mike: I don’t want to read four years of someone’s Open Notebooks about the new aquatic titanosaur, I want to read the paper.

Matt: Those other forms will be harder to measure with current metrics.

Mike: And harder to use. If a researcher doesn’t do the work of writing an actual paper (or something strongly analogous) he’s not getting his job done.

Matt: We-e-ell, would you read someone’s blog about the new aquatic titanosaur?

Mike: Sure. But that’s not at all the same thing. I wouldn’t want or expect the same kind of rigour. There are going to be half a dozen blog posts about the titanosaur, just like there are about the Archbishop, all wildly incomplete and somewhat contradictory.

Matt: Someone from a century hence will say, “If a researcher doesn’t publish her data as early and openly as possible, then follow up in a few months with analysis and discussion, then field questions and suggestions on the same platform for the rest of her career, she’s not getting her job done.”

Mike: I won’t disagree with that. Those things are also part of the job. But in the end, someone is going to want the Here’s What We Learned rigorous summary. That’s the paper.

Matt: Or the abstract. Or the talk. Right now we see these as qualitatively different things. But they may be just points on a more continuous research stream, that is accessed and evaluated as such, in the future.

Mike: Dude. Srsly. You do not want to have to come to grips with someone’s entire research program. You want them to do the work of giving you what you need to know in a discrete package.

Matt: Oh, I agree. For most people, anyway. For you, Pat O’Connor, and one or two others, I want the whole stream. We already have a spectrum of packaging, of which the paper is by far the premiere entity. But it may not always be so.

Mike: Right. I might read the Whole Stream behind Wilson and Allain’s rebbachisaur work, but not for the other 100 papers I’ve been interested in this year.

Matt: For example: right now when people include video along with their papers, it’s video-as-data. But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be video-as-abstract or video-as-discussion-section.
You won’t have to, because there will be other levels of packaging for those other research streams. At least as many levels as there are now, and probably more (but maybe different in kind). Matt: What if the discussion section of the paper was not one person writing about what they thought about it, but a captured Skype conference or Twitter stream between that person and their colleagues, lightly edited.

Mike: Sounds awfu’ complicated.

Matt: Doesn’t everything from the future sound complicated when you first hear about it?

Mike: Bottom line, I read 100 times as many papers as I write, which means the people doing the research I’m reading about have a duty to make it as easy as possible for me to digest what they’ve done, including all relevant background material and discussion. Whatever tech we come up with for doing that, it’s going to be analogous to a paper.

Matt: See, there are huge swaths of most papers that I would happily jettison. I hardly ever read introductions – it’s pretty damn obvious what the paper is about already, and either the background is very familiar to me or so far afield that I’m unlikely to be reading the paper anyway. And I don’t really care about M&M unless there’s a new method that I need to either learn for myself, or understand to decide if the results are actually valid. Until very recently, all of these boxcars had to be delivered as part of a single train. But I should be able to go online and download a ‘paper’ that is just abstract-figures-discussion-references. And someone else should be able to click different boxes. Chemists probably really care about Materials & Methods.

Mike: Interesting,.

Matt: The paper doesn’t go away — it will always be possible for users to click the same pattern of boxes that are the default contents now — but they can also get less, or more (open data, video discussion, Skype conference with author offered from within the paper-access outlet, etc.). In fact — and I hate to admit this — Science & Nature are maybe ahead of the curve here since they’ve been relegating most of the intro, M&M, and all but the most cursory results to SI for a while now. I’m not arguing that papers of the future should evolve to match the tabloids. Just that access may be much more a la carte for users.

Mike: That is total BS. Excuse my sudden apparent hostility.

Matt: Say on

Mike: It’s one thing to unbundle the traditional parts of a paper.
What S&N are doing is relegating crucial parts.

Matt: Yes. I didn’t say they were doing it right. I said they were doing something similar.

Mike: They are the ones saying “Oh, you guys don’t need this”.

Matt: I shouldn’t have said they were ahead of the curve. But I won’t be surprised when in 20 years they claim to have invented the new form of papers back when.

Mike: Anyway I’m not sure how your a la carte vision is practically different from just not reading the intro.

Matt: Because you are talking about what constitutes a paper as a necessary thing, that will continue to be called forth because users find it most convenient.

Mike: The specific sections are not important. The thing that’s important is the process where the author sits down and writes “OK, this is what we did and what it means”. All the supporting data in the world is great, but it’s not that, and that is almost always what you need — at least, it’s your route in.

Matt: And I’m talking about what constitutes a paper being a historical accident that we’ve all gotten used to, which will not disappear so much as spread out into multiple sections (possibly at multiple depths — I can imagine a one-paragraph summary for each classic paper section) so that in a few decades, it will be impossible to say where the online data and post-hoc discussions end and the paper begins.

Matt: Here’s a slippery-slope way it might happen. PeerJ already lets you navigate to each section of each paper by the hyperlinked section headings. It would be super-easy to add a DOI to each section, with instructions on how to cite it. Then what is the paper? Everything that is linked on that page? That’s a pretty arbitrary definition.

Mike: Maybe you should encourage PeerJ to assign those DOIs, and see what happens?

Well, I guess history will show which of us is right. Want to reconvene this conversation in ten years?

Matt: If you’re betting that the future will look like the past with a minor digital facelift, I’ll take that bet. :-) And yes, we should reconvene in 10 years. Because I’m certain that the future will be surprising on some axis that is orthogonal to everything we’ve discussed. Some young genius will come up with a platform that will be to scientific publication what Twitter is to chat.

Mike: OK, I am putting this in my Google calendar.

Matt: Awesome.


And here we are, ten years later. (Well: ten years and three days, in fact, as it took me a while to find the time to write this up.)

Who was right?

Well, me more than Matt. But I think we’d probably both says we’re surprised — and disappointed — at how little things have moved on in those ten years. Not only are we still publishing all our work as papers in journals, we are still desperate to get into one or two special anointed journals that we believe (rightly or wrongly) are necessary for career progression. Articles remain very static objects. PDF is still the preferred format — because HTML versions don’t use any of the affordances of the Web to let us do interesting things, but merely stuff the margins with adverts and menus. (Also: still no aquatic titanosaurs.)

I still think that something analogous to a paper or article is fundamentally desirable: something that provides a complete through-line of thought, rather than just inviting you to dip your hand into a lucky dip of research articles. But there are surely better ways to present it.

The only things that have really changed are (A) that very nearly every journal has its content online, and (B) open access is increasingly ubiquitous. Yay for both of those. But …

What changes do we still want to see? Plenty, I reckon.

But rather than give you my list, let’s hear from y’all in the comments.


Source: https://svpow.com/2025/07/19/did-journal-articles-survive-the-last-ten-years/


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