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If you can get past the initial gut "ick" reaction when you see the mention of AI, this idea is actually in line with what many publishers and research management experts are looking at as future of publishing. Forget the AI part of it for a minute... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Right now, research papers are still based on the archaic system of paper journals. They are PDFs, with paragraphs of text (that researchers have often had to write in their second or third language). But the actual relevance is in the *data* and the text is just there to explain.

So at various meetings, like last year's symposium on the Future of publishing at the Royal Society (for which I wrote the meeting summary note, available at the link), researchers/publishers have been thinking about ways to change this entire system. royalsociety.org/science-even...

A lot of the ideas are something to the extent of: what if instead of rewarding scientists for publishing their data in papers, we rewarded them for depositing the actual data (annotated). Credit would change, and papers would change.

You'd still have text-based papers for reviews, meta-analyses, discussions and such, but in a model like that it would become much easier to sort through published data and to re-analyse data.