After the PDF: A new unit of knowledge for the AI era - Research Information

"For decades, scholarly publishing has operated with an implicit answer: the PDF. We built our entire infrastructure around that assumption. We mint DOIs for documents. We sell collections of documents. We measure impact in citations to documents.

The PDF made sense for its era: portable, platform-independent, and visually consistent. Knowledge, we assumed, lived inside the container, and the container was stable, portable, and sufficient.

But as I argued recently in Research Information on Knowledge-as-a-Service, the industry is shifting from an access economy to an answers economy. Which raises an urgent question: if “answers” are the new product, what’s the essential unit we’re actually packaging? Not documents. Something smaller, denser, and computable.

In an AI-mediated world, the PDF is no longer a vessel for knowledge at all. It is, in fact, often an obstacle. If publishers want to provide “answers” rather than “files,” we need a different atomic unit of knowledge. We must move from the Article to the Knowledge Object."