Much of this knowledge is highly specific, and isn't captured in the literature. We can call this 'tacit' knowledge. To this end, science isn't really the literature - the literature is a partial representation of what we know. The full range of what we know lives inside the minds of researchers.

public goods are not public goods if the public cannot understand them

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.

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)

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

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

Focusing solely on the incentive structures misses the elephant in the room: that we are still relying on 17th Century technology to capture and share knowledge.

There may be good reason to be optimistic about non-'scientists' taking part in science....Innocentive creates prizes to incentivise a distributed global network to solve specific problems for organisations who can't solve those problems in-house. Problems can be highly technical (see image below), and span across many domains. I will reuse Michael... See more

Knowledge grows like species evolve. Ideas are combined to form new knowledge in a process we can call  bisociation , such that new knowledge is really just a combination of existing ideas.