Re:Redesigning the Scientific Paper
by robotresearcher on Thursday April 05, 2018 @08:21PM
(#16769995)
ArXiv has versioned papers and a way of citing them. Itβs working pretty well.
> I assume you don't just means using Github for version control of scientific papers, because that sounds pretty pointless to me.
Why? I recently wrote a paper on GitHub. I loved it.
Re:Redesigning the Scientific Paper
by electricslpnsld on Thursday April 05, 2018 @06:35PM
(#16769391)
> I recently wrote a paper on GitHub.
When you have a paper deadline in two weeks and four authors are furiously hacking in edits left and right, Git is absolutely invaluable when writing a paper. I can't fathom how people handled merges of written text without a version control system.
Re:Redesigning the Scientific Paper
by contravariant on Thursday April 05, 2018 @06:13PM
(#16769242)
I mean sure use whatever you like, but I'm just not sure how much use it would be for people interested in reading your paper.
As far as tracking incremental improvements over time goes, I think it'll be hard to do better than our current method of including references to papers. It's impossible to track ideas the same way tracking code works (which itself is limited for similar reasons).
It would be nice if you could reference papers in a way that immediately allowed you to access them. And the technology to do so is there, but has limited use if papers aren't freely accessible from the internet.
But, given that the system of papers with references is essentially a DAG, I imagine someone will attempt to 'solve' the problem with blockchains before you can say 'initial coin offering'.