Beyond the PDF

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 20, 2011 at 04:22 PM

I think the effort to free scientific work from the constraints imposed upon it by the PDF format is commendable and is an entirely valid reason for a workshop. The PDF is perhaps suitable for business and legal purposes but very poor for consuming scientific information. I support the efforts to make these publications granular, so that one could perhaps do a search by just comparing the methodological sections of thousands of journal articles, without having to download them all and leaf through all the PDFs. Also, annotating, highlighting and then dealing with the annotations is not that easy with PDFs. At the moment one needs a whole range of devices and software to do this, involving several steps.

Ideally I’d like to read my papers on a tablet computer, add notes and highlight while reading them, and capture quotations and citations that could be added automatically to an outlining software. At the moment this is a convoluted process and unsatisfactory, not to mention that there is no way to aggregate scientific papers on the basis of their specific parts, at least not in my field (the social sciences). If all of the above could be done in just a single online platform that would hugely simplify and enhance scientific work.

At the moment I use Whizfolders “watch clipboard” function to capture passages from PDFs, which is OK, but I feel reluctant to buy a Windows-based tablet PC just for that. GoodReader looks nice on the iPad for PDF reading and annotation, but then there is still that business of synchronising the files with the desktop and then it can’t capture passages from PDFs as Whizfolders can. So a post-PDF, web-based environment would be ideal…