I think, however, the biggest issue with scholarly communication right now has to do with how inaccessible the language and techniques tend to be for the average person. Of course, a highly technical paper needs all those details. But I believe we should be looking at requiring authors to maybe make an "extended abstract" sort of deal when submitting articles.
More in line to what you see from news sites who would be reporting on your article, but in a way that will obviously be more accurate; as journalists might overlook important details. The language we use matters so much.
I was hoping more for "Living" as in "active, uncertain, will grow over time".
A toolkit for expressing the research from beginning to the end - the state of the world as you understand it, highlighting the key uncertainties and experiments, and mechanisms for viewing the history.
As a motivating example for the type of "living research paper" that I'm thinking of, think of long-running software design decisions a la the implementation of `async/await` in rust.
This is, I think, the very antithesis of what research papers are for.
The point of a publication is that at some point in time, you wrote down your thoughts and process and results and submitted that writing (and possibly a related artifact) to a committee who evaluated it and decided it was Good.
To have a publication that updates over time is just... it doesn't work. What if it stops being Good? What if you screw something up that invalidates the results? Also, do you just never publish a new thing? How do people learn about the recent changes if not a new publication? Do all researchers now need to subscribe to RSS feeds of every project they've been interested in?
That sort of stuff is what blogs are for — or, honestly, CVs. But a singular publication needs to be frozen in time, or else it honestly loses its value.
Would be nice to have this supported as a custom format in Quarto [1], which supports some interactivity in documents, but doesn’t have the same focus on it as this.
[1]: https://quarto.org/
