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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

 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.

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.