I see a very exciting possibility for the future of academic papers in certain disciplines where we could have a machine validation step performed automatically, not only on submission but as a tool for the author to check their work. Like a git commit hook that forces a test suite to run. Of course, this would require some formalism to tag data, diagrams, and formulae but it's probably in our best interest in the long run to make the body of our research more machine-accessible anyway.
I have a hard time seeing how anything but a teeny tiny fraction of scientific results would ever be amenable to such an automatic checking. And I am a mathematician -- in principle this should be easiest in mathematics, since at least we have well defined axioms and in principle one could derive everything from those axioms. In practice, this seems completely unfeasible for most mathematics, at least currently.
I'm guessing you're not alone, I would go so far as to say that validation software would offend most authors - the same way code validation tools hurt programmers' feelings.
"But I'm right and the tool is wrong! The tool doesn't understand the complexity/brilliance of my work!" And sometimes you're going to be right with that assertion. Other times, however, it will push you and your reviewers towards better quality.
I find it fascinating that the entire article is in fact about this issue, the copyright thing is purely incidental.
I think that's built on a massive assumption about the nature of academic papers tbh. I'm a political scientist doing theoretical work on assemblages of governance and policy - part of my research is trying to come up with an explanation as to how this stuff works, it doesn't boil down to formulae or (many) metrics, although I'm doing methodological work to address that. Accessible, sure, just don't solve a problem that doesn't apply to ~75% of academia!
My bad, I was skim reading in between library sessions, ironically. Could have done with some sort of automated check there on my post, if only someone had suggested something like that... rolls eyes
