Publishing

I should have thought of it earlier: In a day and age when we are increasingly reading scientific literature on computer screens, why is it that we limit our peer-reviewed data representation to static, unchanging graphs and plots? Why do we not try to create dynamic visualizations of our rich and varied data sets? Would we not derive benefits in the quality and clarity of scientific discourse from publishing these visualizations?...

This post is only tangentially about open science. It is more directly about the process of peer review and how it might be improved. I am working on a follow-up post about how these points can be addressed in an open publishing environment. A recent paper on the arXiv got me thinking about the sticking points in the publishing pipeline. As it stands, most scientists have a pretty good understanding of how peer reviewed publishing is supposed to work....