Matteo Cantiello edited Einstein_published_in_1916_a__.tex  about 8 years ago

Commit id: 1e1818c86320f9e6587c52ac6d808474ad19ebc1

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Einstein published in 1916 a paper containing the prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. It has just one author (A.E. himself) and consists of a few pages of text and equations \citep{1916SPAW.......688E}.  Fast forward exactly 100 years, the LIGO collaboration announced in a paper that \href{https://www.authorea.com/users/2/articles/101461/_show_article}{they observed what Einstein had predicted}. The paper has more than 1000 co-authors and it condenses, in just a few pages of text, equations and figures, an enormous amount of technical information \citep{PhysRevLett.116.061102}.   This fundamental result was packaged into a PDF, a static format that does not allow the reader to access and interact with some of the most important elements of the research: data and code. Fortunately Fortunately,  these were released shortly afterwards by the \href{https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW150914/}{LIGO Open Science Center} as a Jupyter notebook. But why the paper and the Jupyter notebook have been published separately? It's clear that the PDF, which is unable to contain and execute data and code, can not be the format of choice for the paper of the future. On the other hand Authorea papers, being web-native, can easily include data and code, allowing readers to interact with the research as they go through the paper.