Re: scientific publishing process (was Re: Cost and access)

Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> writes:

> I will bet that if the requirements evolve towards Webby submissions, within
> 3-5 years time, we'd see a notable change in how we collect, document and mine
> scientific research in SW. This is not just being "hopeful". I believe that if
> all of the newcomers into the (academic) research scene start from HTML (and
> friends) instead of LaTeX/Word (and friends), we wouldn't be having this
> discussion. If the newcomes are told to deal with LaTeX/Word (regardless of
> hand coding or using a WYSIWYG editor) today, they are going to do exactly
> that.


I would look at an environment which has less external force. The free
software engineering community produces it's documents in a very
wide-range of formats. If you peruse github, the key characteristics
are, I think: that they are text formats because they are easy to version
with source and are hackable; and mostly they dump to HTML. PDFs are
very rare these days.

It would be fun to see what the most used are. Markdown is a big
contender, as we as language specific formats (python and
reStructuredText for example).

I don't believe that HTML is a good authoring format any more than PDF
is. I don't think see this as huge problem. HTML needs to be part of the
tool-chain, not all of it.

Phil

Received on Monday, 6 October 2014 11:44:07 UTC