Beyond advertising: New infrastructures for publishing integrated research objects

Abstract:  Moving beyond static text and illustrations is a central challenge for scientific publishing in the 21st century. As early as 1995, Donoho and Buckheit paraphrased John Claerbout that “an article about [a] computational result is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code and data, that produced the result” [1]. Awareness of this problem has only grown over the last 25 years; nonetheless, scientific publishing infrastructures remain remarkably resistant to change [2]. Even as these infrastructures have largely stagnated, the internet has ushered in a transition “from the wet lab to the web lab” [3]. New expectations have emerged in this shift, but these expectations must play against the reality of currently available infrastructures and associated sociological pressures. Here, we compare current scientific publishing norms against those associated with online content more broadly, and we argue that meeting the “Claerbout challenge” of providing the full software environment, code, and data supporting a scientific result will require open infrastructure development to create environments for authoring, reviewing, and accessing interactive research objects.