A Possible Fix for Scientific Publishing

Re:A Possible Fix for Scientific Publishing by drpixie on Sunday August 07, 2022 @08:30PM (#32381290)

Please not video. Video is a horrible way to communicate anything non-trivial: it's slow & difficult to navigate around; it's difficult to extract from (eg. I can't just copy a reference); it's difficult to skim; and it's very time-consuming to edit/revise.

Sure it's not easy to write good documents, but that's half the point - good documents take effort and time to create. The world is full of very low value papers. If the author isn't willing to devote the time and effort to write well, I'm unlikely to devote my time on reading something that is probably trash!

Many of video's advantages are actually disadvantages. Video is easy to produce, so the web is filled with low-value video. Video is easy for low-literacy people to produce, but scientific literacy is less about language and more about thought (I'm perfectly happy to read a idiosyncratic or ungrammatical paper, if it is clear and the contents are valuable).

Scientific writing should be all about communicating with the reader. So unless a video is better for me, the reader, stick with text. Please.

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Re:A Possible Fix for Scientific Publishing by anticensor on Monday August 08, 2022 @02:28AM (#32382866)

> I can't just copy a reference

You could definitely refer to a certain timestamp of a video.

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Re:A Possible Fix for Scientific Publishing by nickersonm on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:12PM (#32387371)

A reference would be the video referring to another paper (or video). That's difficult to extract from the video unless the publisher is going to fully annotate it - and if that's the case, why not just publish the annotations and images? Much faster to read!

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