For accessibility reasons, arXiv is starting to publish HTML versions of papers. https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessibility_html_papers.html 🧵
#math #papers #openscience #academia #arXiv
@brembs
@lambo
I think this is interesting and welcome, especially on mobile devices. It is not without problems to want to quickly check some fact on your phone, download the PDF, go to landscape mode, find the right location in the paper, zoom in, etc.
1/4
The promise would be that in HTML, everything is reformatted to look great on any line length.
But there is a kind of integration attack going on: Once we have the HTML version, why not enhance the paper with things PDF can't do? After all, HTML5 offers limitless possibilities to make the 3D figures interactive, run simulations, have the examples to be toys you can play with, etc.
Once these seemingly harmless new features are there, who would want to go back to the PDF version, which is a
2/4
static, cumbersome and arcane? Once we are there, we will definitely need versioning of publications because if papers become software, they will have bugs and need bug fixes.
I feel very insecure about this future. I am unhappy with how static and old-fashioned it is of us, to stick to this A4-PDF-paper format, for documents which are consumed on laptop and iPhone screens, and it never really fits and scrolling and zooming and whatnot.
3/4
On the other hand, I want to be done with a paper at some point. If publications turn into software, they will just need a lot of maintenance, forever. Maybe it can be solved with open-source culture, maybe future generations will take care of the bug fixing for my papers, but why would they and how would the get credit for this work in an academic system that only rewards new things and not the maintenance?
So what do you think about HTML arXiv papers?
4/4
@tomkalei @buerviper personally I never author PDFs. Too much like dead paper. Presentations on my website are pure HTML and ready for full interactivity using my own open source library:
https://analyticphysics.com
https://paulmasson.github.io/mathcell/docs/
Of course I'm not part of the academic system, so I can implement whatever I feel appropriate. The MathCell library replicates Mathematica's Manipulate command in pure JavaScript, so it runs just by loading the page. Wouldn't have it any other way.
When I make major changes to a page I also note that at the bottom. More detailed tracking of changes is easily implemented with something like GitHub.
@buerviper @paulmasson If research results are versioned like this, would there not be incentives to publish 0. Versions way too early, fix things as you go, and import things that are bad in software development into science and engineering?
Also how would citing work if publications are not static but are updated?
Also some parts of math are super conservative. State of the art results are 50+ years old. Would that kind of quality still be possible in a much accelerated publishing culture?
@tomkalei @paulmasson There are ideas out there about it (like Octopus.ac), but it's difficult to accept widely. For early career researchers, you need these high profile publications, otherwise you won't get a permanent position. So you can't experiment too much with how to publish.
I'm glad preprints are now widely accepted in Chemistry, and you can also update your preprints on chemRxiv and each version gets a version number added to the doi, so you seee exactly which work was cited.
@buerviper @paulmasson I think there comes a cultural change with the technological change. Earlier and smaller publishing will lead to more hurrying, more errors, more jumping to the conclusion. A “move fast break things” culture.
This has benefits and risks but how do they compare in academia specifically? Construction of space craft has different requirements than building a social networking site.
arXiv html versions is another step into this direction. Good and bad.
@buerviper @tomkalei thought I'd share one particular page on my website. When I was first reading Barrett O’Neill’s book "The Geometry of Kerr Black Holes" I wanted all of his illustrations to be live and fully interactive. Eventually I put this together:
Now whenever I see a PDF with two or three special cases of a general solution, I kind of cringe. Could never go back to that myself when I can have so much more in an HTML document.
@zuphilip my point is not the mode of presentation or production, but rather if there exists such thing as a “final version”. How would #academia change if all research was published like software, release 0.11a_p2 etc.
And then it’s a new discussion for super conservative fields like #math. We have some state of the art papers that are 50+ years.
@zuphilip @tomkalei I'm in a completely different field (tech law), but there are definitely (small and big) points in previously published papers that I would like to update. Maybe a law has changed, a talk with a colleague changed my perspective, there's a nuance that I didn't see at the time.
Not sure how this would work, e.g. peer review for each small thing could be cumbersome.
@tomkalei @zuphilip At the same time, hypertext has been known to be superior for information presentation essentially since it was created.
The move to PDF was a regression in most aspects save portability/consistency (math display in most hypertext types is still not properly standardized & implemented in renderers).
However, I think it should be *exclusively* hypertext. Not Javascript/arbitrary-code nonsense (we should not be facilitating information as attack tools).
Interesting! Something like this already exists with ar5iv: take the link for any arXiv paper (older than a few months), change "arxiv.org" to "ar5iv.org" and get an HTML5 version. It's not perfect but I've found useful enough for reading stuff on my phone. e.g.
https://ar5iv.org/abs/2109.12132
My background is astronomy, where the publishers will probably limit PDF content to traditional things for some time yet.
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