The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete. Here's What's Next. - The Atlantic

"Pérez combined the three projects into one and took the reins. From the very beginning, the project, called IPython (the “I” for “Interactive”), was open-source: It wasn’t just that the program was free, but that anyone could inspect its code and modify it, contributing their changes back to the common cause. It was a deliberate decision. “I was interested in both the ethical aspect of being able to share my work with others,” Pérez told me—he came from Colombia, where access to proprietary software was harder to come by—“and there was also a more epistemological motivation.” He thought that if science was to be an open enterprise, the tools that are used to do it should themselves be open. Commercial software whose source code you were legally prohibited from reading was “antithetical to the idea of science,” where the very purpose is to open the black box of nature...."