Alberto Pepe edited back.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 7a7c1aabf131199a84ce41e9dcd61b129d126b6a

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The beautiful figure above is a snapshot (translated to English) of the Sidereus Nuncius \cite{galilei}, a paper Galilei published just over 400 years ago. What can we learn from it? All the data that Galileo collected (his own drawings of Jupiter and the moons), together with metadata (times of observations) were fully included in the final published paper. In other words, one of the fundamental papers for our understanding of our place in the universe, Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo, is essentially an annotated scientific notebook.  The problem with science today is that the scale of the data, analysis, and  code we produce and handle in most disciplines is so large that it simply "does not fit" in a paper anymore. So the papers we publish today end up being rather superficial, high-level accounts of science that fail to open and expose the raw materials of science. Whereas Galileo published annotated scientific notebooks, today we basically publish annotations \textit{without} a scientific notebook. It's about time to re-imagine the scientific article. And at Authorea, we are happy to be working in this direction. Our bet? The article of the future will be a living and breathing, forkable Git repository which seamlessly connects text, images, data, code, and notebooks. So, were he alive today, what would Galileo publish?