The PDF is the digital equivalent to the desk drawer – a place where scientific results are hard to find and easily forgotten. And yet the PDF is still the default way for scholarly publishers to disseminate research on the web.



To communicate research efficiently today, we need a new format for the digital age: one that’s open, easy to work with and social.

The PDF was invented in 1991, which makes it almost as old as the web itself. It was created to make the dream of the paperless office come true. But today we can do more than that.



Here are three reasons why we should ditch the PDF and use the technology we have to make research easier to read.

It makes reading research even more difficult

Reading a research paper means focusing on the text, but also looking at graphs and citations for context. In a PDF, this information is usually hidden somewhere in the text, and in case of references, at the very bottom. You lose time by clicking and scrolling and getting lost.



This problem may sound trivial but it’s not. When you read you collect the information necessary to create new knowledge. It’s in our interest to make the act of reading as easy as possible for researchers.

A few technical tweaks are all it takes to enhance the reading experience . For example, a more intuitive two-column, split-screen design makes it possible to read and look at citations at the same time. It means there’s less opportunity to get distracted and lose your place in the text, and this makes it easier to concentrate on what’s relevant.

It’s a one-way conversation

Before the web was invented reading used to be a one-way street with information flowing from author to reader. This is how the PDF works, too. In the past two to three decades this one-sided communication has been superseded almost everywhere on the web, but so far not in science, at least not broadly.

One reason for this is that the PDF is not malleable. Once the author has saved the document in this format there’s no way for anyone else to have their say – at least not on the same page. Readers can only voice their opinion by using add-ons to the PDF, but these are like loose post-it notes on a piece of paper. They are easily disconnected from their context.



Feedback is most valuable when it’s on the same page as the science itself. Researchers see at a glance what their peers thought of the text and can assess whether it will be a good source for them. Authors can immediately react to comments, update the text and share a new version that’s linked to the original. This opens up the research process and continues it even after publication.

There’s no heightened security concern because modern technology allows for more transparency. New formats could come with a timestamp and obligatory identification for anyone working on it. So openness should not be seen as a risk, but an opportunity. Currently though, very little research gets feedback in whichever form, and that’s because it’s not widely read.

Research is lost and forgotten

Half of all research papers today are only read by their authors, referees and editors. Again, I believe the PDF is partly to blame. This format wraps research results into neat packages, but there’s no additional information that puts them into context, connects them to their author or other related research. The results are lost like a package without an addressee.

The solution is to embed research results into their natural – their social – context. Publications are only small snippets of a researcher’s knowledge. To get the full story you need to connect with the researcher.This way, authors get feedback on their work and readers an idea of its impact.

Others have already loosened the bonds on research results in PDFs and created new formats that make them more navigable. For example, the US National Center for Biotechnology Information has come up with the PubReader, and the publisher Elsevier calls their edition of the format the “article of the future”. What these formats lack however is the social environment in which they flourish.

Ijad Madisch is the CEO and co-founder of ResearchGate, a network of six million researchers worldwide. This week the network is launching an alternative format to the PDF to disseminate research, called the RG Format.



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