Building a 21st century interface for science

the problem is with the interface of scientific literature. We cannot expect the wider population to be scientifically literate if they are not given the capability of understanding the artifacts we use to communicate about new scientific developments.

A major development in this trajectory, not limited to scientific journals alone, was the invention of graphical displays of information...Graphical displays of information are the foundation of every discipline concerned with quantitative information, because they make information human readable.

Pen and paper took us as far as the moon. It's about time we went to the stars.

By analogy, it should act like a Google search, in that users can ask questions of any part of the scientific record. However, it should be unlike a Google search in that it synthesises information across all search results to produce a systems-level understanding of the search query, accessible to the user through many kinds of rich, dynamic repre... See more

In this future, mainstream media no longer interprets scientific information. Instead, they draw directly from the source. In fact, all scientific communication and learning, including every textbook, lecture and online course draws from the same, original, primary artifacts accessible through the same interface. Expert scientists, lay readers and ... See more

Scientific literature is the meeting place between people and ideas at the frontiers of human knowledge. It acts as the interface for science, enabling interaction between people and the shared record of knowledge.

 Since the scientific interface is not capable of serving the general population, people have to blind trust the institutions who communicate science publicly. When that trust evaporates, people begin to reject the information itself.

Fully open, easily accessible data, together with open debate and version control, enables much greater scrutiny over results, which should lead to more accurate knowledge.

Words are a lossy medium for describing rich, multidimensional ideas.