Reuniting data and narrative in scientific articles

Abstract

Data and narrative are both important for scientific discourse. They are 'united' in the mind of the scientist-author, yet the current publishing process favours narrative at the expense of data, making it hard to recreate experiments, intuitively link to relevant data points outside the article in question, or indeed find associated data sets. Utopia Documents helps to solve this problem by enabling readers of articles to follow leads without the need to flip (and particularly search) through other systems, and so enhances their ability to gain a deeper understanding of the arguments being presented. Utopia Documents also removes the linkability barriers hitherto inherent in the PDF format, by bridging the connection gap with the web. © Steve Pettifer, Jan Velterop, Teresa K Attwood, Lee Harland, James Marsh, David Thorne, and Alec Tunbridge.