Presenter Information

Location

School of Law Seminar Room 3.09

Start Date

4-6-2026 12:00 PM

End Date

4-6-2026 12:15 PM

Description

The FORCE11 “Preserving Interactive Research Content” working group (PIRC) has brought together publishers, infrastructure providers, librarians, and researchers to define principles, frameworks, and degradation pathways for maintaining these connections over time. Our goal is not just to archive code and data, but to preserve the affordance of interaction—the ability to tweak, explore, and understand how results were derived.

Modern research is increasingly computational and interactive. From data-heavy simulations to AI-driven analyses, scientists rely on code, data, and interactive tools to interrogate and produce results. Yet scholarly communication remains largely stuck in the print era - the static PDF research paper. Even online, most papers are essentially digital facsimiles of print, disconnected from the underlying code and data. This disconnect from their underlying code, data, and interactive executional environments has serious implications and “needlessly limit, inhibit and undermine effective knowledge transfer” (Bourne et al., 2012)—impeding discoverability, reuse, verification, and long-term access to the full scientific record.

We will share the outputs from the working group that have developed a framework for progressive enhancement to add interactive content to research articles, as well as the graceful degradation of that content over time. The PIRC Framework proposes clear degradation pathways - ensuring that even when interactive computational figures start to no longer work, notebooks, static figures, and metadata persist as meaningful records.

Participants will be invited to help shape these principles and framework and join an open international collaboration to define best practices for preserving the next generation of interactive and executable research content.

Share

COinS
 
Jun 4th, 12:00 PM Jun 4th, 12:15 PM

FORCE11 Working Group: Preserving Interactive and Executable Research Content in the Scholarly Record

School of Law Seminar Room 3.09

The FORCE11 “Preserving Interactive Research Content” working group (PIRC) has brought together publishers, infrastructure providers, librarians, and researchers to define principles, frameworks, and degradation pathways for maintaining these connections over time. Our goal is not just to archive code and data, but to preserve the affordance of interaction—the ability to tweak, explore, and understand how results were derived.

Modern research is increasingly computational and interactive. From data-heavy simulations to AI-driven analyses, scientists rely on code, data, and interactive tools to interrogate and produce results. Yet scholarly communication remains largely stuck in the print era - the static PDF research paper. Even online, most papers are essentially digital facsimiles of print, disconnected from the underlying code and data. This disconnect from their underlying code, data, and interactive executional environments has serious implications and “needlessly limit, inhibit and undermine effective knowledge transfer” (Bourne et al., 2012)—impeding discoverability, reuse, verification, and long-term access to the full scientific record.

We will share the outputs from the working group that have developed a framework for progressive enhancement to add interactive content to research articles, as well as the graceful degradation of that content over time. The PIRC Framework proposes clear degradation pathways - ensuring that even when interactive computational figures start to no longer work, notebooks, static figures, and metadata persist as meaningful records.

Participants will be invited to help shape these principles and framework and join an open international collaboration to define best practices for preserving the next generation of interactive and executable research content.

 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.