IVivoras·May 9, 2020
First we need to move away from PDF as a method of distribution of research papers. While it's an immense improvement over the dead-tree medium and images containing scanned paper pages, it's a visual presentation medium instead of a semantic medium.
We'll see how long that particular revolution in communication takes.
Once / if we have all that information in even a loosely structured but plaintext format (whatever that may be ... JSON? XML? semantic HTML? MHTML? TeX? as long as both images and text can live in the same file), there will be another revolution in accessibility, ease of distribution and accountability.
Who knows, we might even stop mentioning GitHub as a best practice for that and use something distributed, blockchain-like.
Imagine a future where citations of previous work looks like "As H.G.Wells et all mention in block 4
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f98aaf1 document #391, the foo is better than the bar." with hyperlinks of course. Peddling my own wares, it can be done with something like https://github.com/ivoras/daisy .