At two recent occasions, I heard about Elsevier’s Executable Paper contest. The intention was to show concepts for the next generation of publications. Or as Elsevier put it:

Executable Paper Grand Challenge is a contest created to improve the way scientific information is communicated and used.

It asks:

• How can we develop a model for executable files that is compatible with the user’s operating system and architecture and adaptable to future systems?
• How do we manage very large file sizes?
• How do we validate data and code, and decrease the reviewer’s workload?
• How to support registering and tracking of actions taken on the ‘executable paper?’

By now, the contest is over, and the winners have been announced:

First Prize: The Collage Authoring Environment by Nowakowski et al.
Second Prize: SHARE: a web portal for creating and sharing executable research papers by Van Gorp and Mazanek.
Third Prize: A Universal Identifier for Computational Results by Gavish and Donoho.

Congratulations to all! At the AMP Workshop where I am now, we were lucky to have a presentation about the work by Gavish and Donoho, which sounds very cool! I also know the work by Van Gorp and Mazanek, using virtual machines to allow others to reproduce results. Still need to look into the winner’s work…

If any of this sounds interesting to you, and I believe it should, please take a look at the Grand Challenge website, and also check out some of the other participants’ contributions!

Here at the workshop, we also had an interesting related presentation yesterday by James Quirk about all that can be done with a PDF. Quite impressive! For examples, see his Amrita work and webpage.