One fundamental principle of science is that there is no privileged observer. You get to question what people did. But to question, you first must know what people did. So part of good scientific practice is to make it easy for people to understand how the sausage was made—how the data were collected, transformed, and analyzed—and ideally, why you chose to make the sausage that particular way. Papers are ok places for describing all this, but we now have better tools: version controlled repositories with notebooks and readme files.
The barrier to understanding is not just lack of information, but also poorly organized information. There are three different arcs of information: cross-sectional (where everything is and how it relates to each other), temporal (how the pieces evolve over time), and inter-personal (who is making the changes). To be organized cross-sectionally, you need to be macro organized (where is the data, where are the scripts, what do each of the scripts do, how do I know what the data mean, etc.), and micro organized (have logic and organization to each script; this also means following good coding style). Temporal organization in version control simply requires you to have meaningful commit messages. And inter-personal organization requires no effort at all, beyond the logic of pull requests.
The obvious benefits of this new way are known. But what is less discussed is that this new way allows you to critique specific pull requests and decisions made in certain commits. This provides an entirely new way to make progress in science. The new unit of science also means that we just don’t dole out credits in crude currency like journal articles but we can also provide lower denominations. We can credit each edit, each suggestion. And why not. The third big benefit is that we can build epistemological trees where the logic of disagreement is clear.
The dead tree edition is dead. It is also time to retire the e-version of the dead tree edition.