Comment by ivoras | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivoras | Hacker News Reader

First we need to move away from PDF as a method of distribution of research papers. While it's an immense improvement over the dead-tree medium and images containing scanned paper pages, it's a visual presentation medium instead of a semantic medium.

We'll see how long that particular revolution in communication takes.

Once / if we have all that information in even a loosely structured but plaintext format (whatever that may be ... JSON? XML? semantic HTML? MHTML? TeX? as long as both images and text can live in the same file), there will be another revolution in accessibility, ease of distribution and accountability.

Who knows, we might even stop mentioning GitHub as a best practice for that and use something distributed, blockchain-like.

Imagine a future where citations of previous work looks like "As H.G.Wells et all mention in block 4f98aaf1 document #391, the foo is better than the bar." with hyperlinks of course. Peddling my own wares, it can be done with something like https://github.com/ivoras/daisy .

Wikipedia/WikiData seem to have already all solved all these problems.

Which is why I think a lot of burnt out scientists spend their time there editing articles.

Likes for mentioning Wikipedia. (by a Wikipedian)

I totally agree, but I think the state of a research field is too malleable / moves too quickly to be a Wikipedia article (where people expect things to be "true").

A few weeks ago I spun up wikisurvey.org to try and make a place for Wikipedia-like collaboration on research. There's nothing on there yet, but I'm hoping it will enable low-latency collaboration once we get the ball rolling.

i somewhat dislike this idea. it seems like it treats scientific papers as independent, isolated containers of reliable facts which can be reliably and authoritatively cited without any need for context.

This is a really common way of reading scientific papers, but I think it is ultimately harmful: I believe it contributed to the replication crisis as well as terrible scientific journalism in the popular press. Current scientific papers certainly do not meet this standard and I'm not sure it's even possible or desirable to require that they do.

Ultimately, I think we just have to accept that scientific papers only really make sense as part of a large body of scientific literature, to which they are responding and which respond to them.

The problem is a lot of people would rather just pick one or a few papers, cite them to justify a claim with total certainty, and then move on. I worry about encouraging this tendency.

PDF may not be perfect,but I prefer it over any fancy system every single time.

> Imagine a future where citations of previous work looks like "As H.G.Wells et all mention in block 4f98aaf1 document #391, the foo is better than the bar."

I dunno, it’s easier for me to describe and to remember “Radin’s 801 paper” or “the ultimate papers” or such.

My really simple preference for a stupidly minor improvement would just be PDF without pagination. Like, we don't have page breaks on web pages, so why not have print optimized and scroll optimized renderings of the paper?

I feel like the papers published at https://distill.pub/ does a decent job of moving toward a more modern solution. There's no doubt that doing it this way often requires a lot more work, and maybe even a new set of skills to even make or visualize though.

And it doesn't really incorporate the diff concept in any way atm, but I imagine it's up their alley at least.

Can these papers be downloaded?

The greatest concern with any web-based solution is reliability. A PDF might not be as easy to grasp as a web-based solution with live examples and graphs that make the content more approachable but it is still worth gold since I can back it up and have it available whenever I need it. Web-resources on the other hand can become unavailable at a moment's notice.

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