Scientific Documents as First-Class Objects on AT Protocol

The Continuous/Modular science pioneers have "taken the first step toward bringing scientific documents onto" the Atmosphere: "OXA now defines an AT Protocol lexicon ... This post introduces the lexicon, explains the design decisions behind it, and describes where we’re headed"

It starts by pointing out that although atproto was developed for social media, its properties "map remarkably well onto the problems scientific publishing has been struggling with for decades...User-owned data... Decentralized discovery... Interoperability by default. ... Built-in identity".

But "A PDF on a decentralized network is still a PDF — opaque, monolithic, and inert." Instead, OXA allows us to "represent the content itself in standardized, structured ways... enables deep links into specific sections, figures, or claims... [with]modularity and composability ... components of a publication can be referenced, reused, and recombined independently... [plus] distributed annotations — third parties adding new layers of meaning".