Tuesday, August 04, 2009
About F-ing Time
Someone in the scientific publishing biz is thinking, there might be a better way to format articles, one that isn't based around the printing press, but the so-called "Information Superhighway". Check out the samples here and here. Imagine the possibilities!!!! Could this be the end to the time-honored tradition of re-formatting scientific data into a useless and archaic format when it comes time to publish?
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5 comments:
Awesome. I actually like that it's Cell doing this so it stands a chance of going mainstream.
Having a standard format for incorporating video and audio is awesome.
Concerns:
-Can I look at it in my browser offline?
-Can I search the entire document for keywords using my browser? (I don't think so and this has to be fixed IMO.)
-I hope that the interviews and all the extra diagrams associated with the publication don't slow the publication process down too much.
Offline? Welcome to the internet age my friend, soon even the computer's OS will be online...
It was about time video was well integrated in the publication. The interview part would be better served in a podcast maybe.
Yeah I agree, ideally this kind of thing would be in a standard format that is readable outside of the Cell web-o-sphere. But maybe they need to maintain access control to extract profits and develop a quality product...a lot of people are saying everything has to be free, but to me if someone puts effort into making a better product, it's worth paying something for...as opposed to just churning out PDFs I can make myself on my laptop with my highly legal copy of Adobe Illustrator...
There are still PDFs of the papers (linked at the top) so you can still save to your computer, read offline, keyword search the entire text and print out. Though whether this is a feature or just to compare to the original format is unclear.
Funny you mention it, Cell also now puts out a video podcast featuring the paper's authors, some are actually pretty good, and available on iTunes I think.
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