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If we lived in the parallel universe where Zefram Cochrane doesn't shoot the Vulcan, this would all just be hypertext! Just HTML with a tasteful stylesheet. Oh, that reference to another paper looks interesting? Just click on it and have a lookaroo

@aeva You know, it's kind of crazy how much everyone has been convinced to give useless citations and/or references. Compare and contrast how many times you've gone through looking up a citation versus clicking a hyperlink.

@TheZouave it's a friction thing. With a hyperlink, I click on it and the information is there. For a paper citation, I have to google the name of the author(s), year, and title, wade through a bunch of paywall seo and then find a dead link to a ~ directory on a university website that now redirects to the a generic page full of pictures of smiling twenty somethings doing group work, try archive.org instead, but it's not archived, and then go back to the seo to fish for a doi identifier and

@TheZouave if I'm lucky, what falls out at the end is pdf with OCR text from a scan of a bad photocopy of paper from the late 20th century, and it is inexplicably partially written in greek.

@jannem @aeva And yet, the vast majority of papers are sent as a pdf and read on a computer. I understand this is a relic of actual paper journals, but the fact that the standard hasn't updated in the past 30 years to reflect the reality of how the media is viewed is inexcusable.

@TheZouave @aeva
Probably going to change eventually.

But for that to happen you will need a format that is portable in the way a pdf is. You *really* want your own copy of all papers you collect, to put in your reference database. Links to pages are far too unreliable.

Edit: something like epub for papers. It'd have to be *really* good at stuff such as displaying mathematics. And it'd need something special to entice people to make the shift.

@aeva @TheZouave
Most research is paywalled, often even to other researchers. I have published papers that I myself don't have access to. It's absolutely ridiculous. That's why Sci-hub is thriving for instance.

So it's absolutely normal and expected to ask people for papers. I absolutely understand that it feels awkward if you're not used to it though.

@jannem @TheZouave ok so maybe I'm not understanding your point here but I've heard this advice before and *it's not a solution it's a crappy bandaid*

@aeva @TheZouave
I agree; it *is* a crappy bandaid.

But it's a crappy bandaid that even researchers have done for decades, because all incentives point toward keeping this crappy system and no incentives point away.

Again, the first thing needed would be a modern replacement for pdf *files*, one that does things so much better it's worth the pain of switching. The main audience for papers is other researchers and web pages don't work.

@jannem @TheZouave dude chill