Building a 21st century interface for science

real scientific understanding arises from synthesising a wide range of literature, because synthesis is the mechanism that provides the context which makes a paper understandable...Given this fact, the interface should be primarily responsible for enabling efficient synthesis

The responsibility of any interface is to understand and mitigate fallible human behaviours to meaningfully extend our capabilities.

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.

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.

In many cases, the reader might be able to provide valuable insight that was inaccessible to the author, simply because they have had a different set of experiences. They may be able to unlock something important by applying their own knowledge in the context of the paper. Despite being highly valuable, this kind of insight isn't recorded anywhere,... See more

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

 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.

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.

Let's take a moment to compare the beginning and the end of our 336 year journey:... It's hard to ignore that they are shockingly similar. (see image in article of publication from 1700s and today)

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