more busy work leads to more justification for larger APCs...
+1 on a light and accessible format, like submitting markdown and notebooks, which the tools around this markdown flavor is enabling https://myst-tools.org/
While changing and improving their content and the "form" of the article is probably time best spent -- probably we would do more to improve the experience for the audience by dumping the PDF and moving to web based articles entirely, structured data, html papers, linked content and customisable viewing experiences would all improve the reading experience massively.
it would also help us move away from the PDF to a web based medium, pdfs are generally suboptimal if not awful reading experiences for a scientific paper
The fast pdf generation is great but I lament on their choice of markup language, why create yet another? I'm a fan of writing content in markdown and there is at least on markdown flavour (MyST markdown) that gives the essential writing features needed for papers. (citations, cross references, figures, tables)
If you want to write, publish and deploy - online the tool I am building can help you do that, either via markdown+git or an online editor https://curvenote.com . That would let you write but also use LaTeX math for equation typesetting as well ad numbering, referencing etc... you can also host and deploy it on a free service too as well as convert to PDF/Tex when/if you need to generate a hard copy.
great work! it' such a pity that so much gets put into PDFs still as a medium for textbooks when interactive content is so much better.
I've been working on some integrations along the lines of explorable texts that are backend by compute in jupyter - like this mini one on fourier series https://curvenote.github.io/demo-fourier/ (pres the power button to connect to a binder instance).
There ia notebook behind the scenes, and the idea is to try and move from custom web/js development towards something that a content creator say who is familar with python can use. Also open up the possibility of computing with libraries in the python ecosystem, and with compute needs beyond what we can achieve in the browser.
Still this example is a one off react site, built with JS knowledge.
Working from the other direction I'm also working with folks on a static site generator that can use Markdown(MyST) and Juptyer Notebooks to build book like content, this is a little like JupyterBook but with a JS stack that can integrate the explorable JS based interactivity on the link above.
The idea is again to let people focus on content and have a site generator let them build the deployable book. The cli that does that is open source and in beta at the moment in terms of readiness https://curvenote.com/docs/web but we're excited about what it can do already and busy working on the explorable integrations - looking for feedback and direction too :)
I agreed with you up until the last paragraph. Generating data that cannot be told apart from any real data, cave ins and all, is probably one area where this can succeed.
Your other comment about picking the horizon of interest is really on point, that's where automated interpretation as it's been buzzworded to hell to date as had had no chance and has never lived up to how it was pitched. Many tools just made the problem worse.
That fact that this might change in some distant future, well it may be solved in some capacity but is it really worth the effort? Given that exploration has a limited future.
true and it seems like a similar scraped-abtract, someone-needs-to upload-the-pdf-so-we-don't-get-blamed model that you see on researchGate and academia.edu
yes, version control is baked in so once you save a version of an article or notebook the blocks are immediately reference-able, so if you use that table in your paper, its still linked to the same block/cell in the notebook and has a unique hash allowing referencing / lookup via our API and its easy to save new versions.
We are introducing templates for sure. Word is on our roadmap but first up is to introduce LaTeX templates including user defined ones. We started mapping out the initial UI and we've got some ideas for how to allow public and community generated templates to be added to the system too, we went through these in a recent meetup, it's recorded so you can see more here => https://youtu.be/r46wN4KWPac?t=1024
Bret's work is inspiring and we're at a point where we have the media and tech available to make that massive upgrade.
When you look at work like this, and also the work produced by distill.pub achieving it is beyond the reach of most researchers. Right now that means someone would need to custom build the experience -- html/web development skills required. One of our aims with Curvenote is to bring that within the reach of most researchers, making it easy to publish interactive content by default.
In Curvenote's editor you collaborate on the content as you would in something like google docs, without needing to write Latex -- but with the features you'd reach to Latex for; equations, figures, citations, cross referencing etc...
Documents can then be exported as a PDF which uses Latex for typesetting, currently that's with a default template, but we're working on user defined templates right now.
When people's workflow is not data heavy, we think there are other features making Curvenote an attractive place to work; the WYSIWYG style of writing, real-time comments and easy sharing on one hand but also how Curvenote helps you easily reuse, update and build on your existing content.
"..makes you qualified to talk about the problem..." I like that take, you are in a position to empathize but not necessarily know the solution or even the real problem as it manifests differently in different settings outside of your experience