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 is essentially an open annotated scientific notebook.

The scale of the data, analysis, and code we produce and handle today in most disciplines is so large that it simply “does not fit” in a paper as it did in Galileo’s times. So the papers we end up publishing become rather superficial, high-level accounts of science that fail to open and expose the raw materials of research. Whereas Galileo published annotated scientific notebooks, today we publish annotations without a scientific notebook.

It’s time to re-imagine the scientific article. And at Authorea, we are excited to be paving the way. Our mission? To enable the article of the future: a living, breathing, forkable Git repository which seamlessly connects text, images, data, code, and notebooks, like this.

So, were he alive today, what would Galileo publish?