The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.

Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete. Here’s What’s Next. – The Atlantic

The scientific paper is definitely currently being strained in it’s ability to vet ideas. The article gives a nice narrative through the invention of Mathematica and then Jupyter as the path forward. The digital notebook is incredibly useful way to share data analysis as long as the data sets are made easily available. The DAT project has some thoughts on making that easier.

The one gripe I’ve got with it is being a bit more clear that Mathematic was never going to be the future here. Wolfram has tons of great ideas, and Mathematic is some really great stuff. I loved using it in college 20 years ago on SGI Irix systems. But one of the critical parts of science is sharing and longevity, and doing that on top of a proprietary software platform is not a foundation for building the next 400 years of science. A driving force behind Jupyter is that being open source all the way down, it’s reasonably future proof.