Agree on the reproducibility aspect, but not on the static medium of PDF [LWN.net]

Agree on the reproducibility aspect, but not on the static medium of PDF

Posted Jun 8, 2025 5:09 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
Parent article: The importance of free software to science

Here's a good blog post (from 2018) by Nobel-winning economist Paul Romer, on "Jupyter, Mathematica and the future of the research paper". He makes many of the same points about open science and reproducibility, and not being locked down to a proprietary system. But much more.

The main point is, in 2018 and even more in 2025, a static PDF is a very limited way of communicating science. We can do much better.

A Jupyter notebook is a significant game-changer here. Though it is not accepted as a medium of publication by journals, there is a lot of useful supplementary data out there in such formats. And it is of course important that it is not proprietary, unlike Mathematica. But its dynamic nature is also important.

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Agree on the reproducibility aspect, but not on the static medium of PDF

Posted Jun 9, 2025 19:04 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link]

The big issue with notebooks is reproducability; I often have difficulty getting a notebook running that we written by a colleague at the same organisation a few months ago.

Given their expanded capabilities, notebooks are inherently going to be harder to reproduce in their orignal fidelity than a PDF, which is fully described by a self-contained specification, though how one is meant to read a specification distributed as a PDF leads to other questions. Being open makes reproduction possible, but it is still a significant hurdle.

I think static documents such as PDF still has a role to play, even if it is just a medium to determine one's interest in some work before investigating the code.

The web is an interesting publishing medium, forming a sort of middle ground between static PDFs and the fully dynamic notebook. I see more journals embracing it as a distribution mechanism; some even allow for interactive plots powered by JavaScript. So perhaps that will be the future direction.