The Scientific Paper is Obsolete (2018)

I don't know if they necessarily should. It's easy enough to post your own supporting materials online. But it doesn't fit the publisher's mission of keeping a timeless paper trail of ideas.

Really? I've read a lot of SIGGraph papers, and sure, they didn't provide all the code. But you know that the code exists. And certainly for those there's a lot of trust. I think we're talking here about something different. Not "hey, you can use quaternions for animation" but "If you factor in hippopotamus usage, young adults experience 22% more flange per square doughnut, and we got all this data, and we ran it through 25 separate computer programs written in lolcode, and look, proof!"

EMBL-EBI and others had some RDF-related effort to provide machine readable abstracts, which I thought was a really cool idea.

IMHO, the biggest problem with papers is politics and reviews. In many top journals like Nature there's no double-blind review (actually in Nature it's now optional but big groups never use it). And even if there was double-blind review, referees have no skin in the game. So the usual outcome is to get reviewed by a big name in your field, who is actually interested in controlling research trends and killing "competitors".

This is hindering progress and hurting new ideas. For example, proponents of Alzheimer's disease being caused by an infection or dysbiosis have had a hard time to do research, get grants and publish articles during the last 2 decades. Despite their theory is able to explain the etiology quite well, unlike competing alternatives.

Another problem is that to publish in good journals you need cool results. Cool results are rare, but Nature, Science, Cell et al. are full of articles every month. So, most groups are overselling and misreporting things. Research fraud, p-value hacking and data manipulation are really common.

Why is this surprising? When all truth is subjective no truth matters.

It's easy to say things are obsolete when you are your own publisher (Victor, Wolfram, Perez) or when can suggest your favorite (even if it's very cool) approach (Jupyter Notebooks) as a potential key solution. If you can't be your own publisher, it's a much more difficult proposition.

We're trying to figure out how to facilitate taxonomists publishing their own taxon pages, i.e. species descriptions, from a science 250+ years old. Our MVP use case is ~20k pages, one per species, for one project. There will be many of these projects, though maybe not many with 20k pages, and some with much greater than 20k pages. Updates are needed with as little latency as possible with data from from multiple sources. There has to be basically zero cost to serve these (I know, nothing is free). Sites must be trivially configurable (e.g. clone a GH template repo and edit a YAML file and some markdown). Even if we can get this in infrastructure in place we then have to figure out how to get the social structure in place to have this type of product recognized as equivalent to traditional on paper publishing, i.e. advance people's careers because they "published".

In my field, until we give people the power to publish on their own, I don't see traditional publishing go away. Many in the past have indeed published (traditionally) their own species descriptions on their own dime, meeting the rules within the various international codes of nomenclature. I also don't have a problem with dead wood- if we go digital too fast we will loose so much for any number of reasons associated with the ephemeral nature of electron-based infrastructures.