If I'm writing a paper, it's great for collaboration if it can be written in the browser. Being able to preview my paper in the browser sounds nice too, but to publish it I need to be able to compile it into a PDF.
yes, we (scientists and scholars) still rely on the exchange of PDFs to communicate research. This is a pity. The problem is that a scholarly paper in PDF, even when it is on the web, it is essentially a photograph of a (physical, analog) paper. As such, a PDF fails to expose the living, dynamic, interactive nature of research. The baseline motivation for Authorea is to expose such nature: to expose the data underlying plots and images, to allow articles to be forked and cloned, to enable web-native data visualizations, to get version control right, and so on. We are trying to move in this direction!
I hear what you are yearning for - I remember trying to convince my supervisor that researchers need to look towards github for progress.
His response stuck with me: While scientific research is continuous and never complete, the whole point of publication is that it is a record in a fixed point in time. The results and discussion cannot be altered, or reused: it is a milestone, a historical record of a novel contribution to knowledge. Sure, you might reanalyse your data, rework an image with new parameters what have you, but the nature of sharing your work with your scientific community requires it to be static.
I partly agree with your supervisor. While publications are indeed milestones and are great for obtaining recognition in the scholarly community, they can still exist and accomplish their function alongside their "rich" counterparts: online versions of those publications with live, dynamic, executable data and images, to allow forking, cloning, and interaction. We now produce research in a much more dynamic environment than even just a decade ago. My hope is that 10 years from now a scientific paper "locked" in a PDF format will look obsolete. I may be wrong, but I sincerely hope that.
Indeed. A snapshot could be a tag, and a reference contains that tag. Looking up a reference would let you see the paper in the state that is being referenced, but also allow you to easily move forward to later versions.
We are a long way from that now, but it is appealing.
